Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

  And what did Frankenstein, a sensational novel written in 1816 and adapted even more sensationally to the screen in 1931, have to do with a murder committed in the twenty-first century?

  Ruth was on the phone, assuring someone that he had indeed called the university power plant, but that it wasn’t a power plant now (and more’s the pity, was her attitude). Valentino swept past her station, grateful to be spared another soul-destroying exchange, and opened his office door to find a woman seated behind his desk.

  Their gazes locked for less than a second before he drew the door shut and confronted Ruth, who was putting down the receiver. “What’s Teddie Goodman doing in my office?”

  “She said she was a friend. I told her you might not be back, but she said she’d wait awhile. I told her to go on in.”

  “You let in a complete stranger?”

  “I had to. There’s no place to sit out here, and I can’t work with people skulking about.”

  He wasn’t even sure what work that was. He hadn’t dictated a letter in weeks and Kyle Broadhead was entirely self-contained inside his monk’s cell with his pre-Columbian computer. “What if she turned out to be a thief?”

  “Thieves don’t dress that well. They wear striped convict shirts and little black masks.”

  He turned back to his door to trade one headache for another.

  “That was rude even for you,” Teddie Goodman said when he was inside. “The social graces are lost on you ivy league types. I’m glad I dropped out.”

  He’d never quite been able to place her accent. At times she sounded like a bad imitation of Bette Davis in Jezebel, at others like Yosemite Sam. At the moment it was Bette, but neither dialect matched her insistence that she was a close relative of Theda Bara’s, the Ohio beauty queen-cum-mysterious woman from the Middle East, here to snatch men’s souls on the silent screen. She did bear a passing resemblance to the old-time vamp, a razor-thin mannequin with black-black hair swept back from her sharp features and bladelike nails, today painted deep red to match her lipstick and swath of scarlet spiraling up diagonally from the hip of her black sheath dress and over the opposite shoulder. Her salary as Mark David Turkus’ personal hatchetwoman at Supernova International allowed her to wear the latest fashions from Beverly Hills and Paris, and to wear them only once before turning them over to some less fortunate wealthy woman. At the moment she was using Valentino’s desk as a vanity table, touching up her jet-trail eyebrows with the aid of a black pencil and a compact mirror with a mother-of-pearl case.

  “Your inferiority complex is showing, Teddie. You can go back and finish your education any time you want. Even your so-called great-great-grandmother got her diploma before she went into pictures.”

  “I never said she was my great-great-grandmother. An aunt, maybe, or a cousin. That was the family talk. I never took the trouble to look it up.”

  “Of course not. If you did and the Turk found out you’re a fraud, he might not like you anymore.”

  “I’m just not interested in the past. I’m no moldy fig like you and that old crotch across the hall. Gary Cooper or Tom Arnold, they’re all the same to me, as long as I can make a buck.” She snapped shut the case and returned it and the pencil to a red alligator clutch bag. He could picture her catching the gator with her bare hands and dyeing the hide with its blood.

  He took the seat he’d cleared off for Sergeant Gill and crossed his ankles on a pile of press clippings on the desk. “To what do I owe this invasion of my privacy?”

  “The Maltese Falcon chair showed up on Sotheby’s online catalogue this morning. What’s up your sleeve?”

  “Not a thing. Did you think I’d try to ring in anything but the real McCoy on the appraisers?”

  “Oh, I’m satisfied it’s genuine. Boy Scouts don’t run scams. Movie nerd that you are, you’d never part with that chair unless you needed to finance something better. What is it, foreign or American? Silent or talkie? We can strike a deal if you come clean, split the theatrical and distribution rights. I’ll find out what it is anyway, but if I have to go to that trouble I’ll cut you off at the ankles.”

  He laughed in relief. Teddie Goodman always operated on the principle that she knew more than you did, whoever you were. He’d been afraid she’d come to gloat over having sniped him out of some acquisition he’d been working on for months or years. To reveal ignorance was a desperate sign. Maybe his shot in the dark had hit something after all, and her honeymoon with Turkus was over.

  “Go ahead and bray, you hyena. I don’t make threats just to hear myself talk.”

  He stopped laughing, but not because she’d ceased to amuse him. “Someday, Teddie, you’ll snarl yourself in your own web. Not everyone’s as devious as you. I’ve got bills to pay. I’m sure your spies have kept you posted on what’s going on in West Hollywood.”

  “That white elephant? Why don’t you just sell your blood?”

  “I only had five quarts to spare.”

  “On the level?” She fixed him with eyes the color of teak, only without the warmth.

  “I swear it on your great-great-grandmother’s grave. Or your cousin’s. Whatever. It’s the truth. Not that it’s your business.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He was exhausted suddenly. The exchange had made him forget for a moment his friend’s murder, but it all came rushing back into the void that existed between him and the creature seated behind his desk.

  They really were polar opposites: He saw money only as a means to the end of preserving film culture, while she rescued lost films only to finance her extravagant lifestyle. If he started condemning people for that, he wouldn’t have forged the professional relationships he needed to continue his crusade. She suspected such altruism and held it in contempt. But she was very good at what she did, maybe the best in the business. Theodosia Burr Goodman was the bizarro Valentino.

  “Believe what you want, Teddie. Can I call you a cab, or did you park your broom in the garage?”

  “That’s sexist, and lame besides.” She stood, holding her bag. She wasn’t as tall as she looked. He’d heard she’d come to town looking for work as a model at the height of the heroin chic craze, but had lacked two inches of the fashion industry standard. If only she’d had those two inches, Valentino thought; if only Major League Baseball had signed Fidel Castro to a pitching staff when he’d tried out. He told her he hoped the Turk enjoyed his chair.

  “He doesn’t enjoy anything, once he has it. We’ve got a lot in common.” At the door she paused, then looked back at him with the expression of the malicious screen vamp she tried so hard to resemble. “Will you be seeing Lorna Hunter soon, or should I give her your regards?”

  His reaction cheered her visibly on the way out.

  For a horrible moment he thought (and chastised himself for sinking to Teddie’s suspicious level) that he’d been betrayed. But he’d confided his mission only to Broadhead, and Kyle was Fort Knox when it came to keeping a secret under lock and key. He looked at his telephone. He couldn’t remember if he’d used it after he’d called Lorna to ask if he could come by that morning.

  He settled the question by pressing the redial button.

  “This is Lorna Hunter. I can’t come to the phone, but I’m sure you know what to do.” The recording sounded heartbreakingly chipper.

  “Lorna, it’s Valentino.”

  She picked up. “Val?” Her tone was alert, not fogged with alcohol now. He wasn’t as relieved as he’d have been under other circumstances. He should have known his evil twin would think to do the same thing he had in search of answers.

  He asked Lorna if someone had tried to call her recently.

  “The phone’s been ringing all day: reporters, calling about Craig. I don’t have caller ID, so I’ve been letting the machine do all the work. Someone called a little while ago and hung up without leaving a message. Do you know who it was?”

  He told her about Teddie. “She can’t be trusted. She thinks I’m work
ing on some kind of deal, and no one’s better at wheedling out information. The police might consider what I’m doing interfering in their investigation. She’d use it as leverage against me. I don’t care so much about that, but I don’t want you involved.”

  “But what would she have to gain? There’s no deal.”

  “She’d never believe that. She thinks everyone has an angle. It would be best if you avoided contact.”

  “I’m a past master at that, especially lately. But maybe you should let it drop. If you got in trouble over me, I’d never forgive myself.”

  “I’d be a worse friend than I’ve been if I let myself be scared off. If you hear my voice on the machine, pick up. I’ll only call if I know something or to make sure you’re all right.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “I almost never know what I’m doing until I’ve done it. It’s in my job description.”

  “You’re a good friend, Val. Don’t tell yourself any different.”

  He wished she hadn’t said that. After they finished talking, he realized some of the anxiety he’d been feeling came very close to excitement. Under all the grief and regret he’d begun to feel the thrill of the chase. Damn her, Teddie was right. He was working on some kind of deal, and for some reason it involved Frankenstein.

  *

  The Oracle was all his, thanks to union regulations demanding time-and-a-half for overtime. He made sure all the outside doors were locked and entered the projection booth, only to be reminded that he wasn’t alone at all. He was sharing quarters with werewolves, mad scientists, and the walking dead, sprawled across the sofa bed like unwelcome guests. Craig Hunter’s portable library leered, hinted, nudged, and cajoled, but did not explain.

  Wearily, Valentino gathered some of the books at one end into a stack to make room for himself, then rested them in his lap and selected one. He didn’t know if he was looking for answers or just a diversion to settle his swarming thoughts and make him drowsy enough to sleep.

  The book was James Whale’s Frankenstein, part of the Film Classics Library line issued by Universe Books in 1974. The titles were aimed at the hard-core film buff who was accustomed to setting his alarm clock for some wee hour in order to catch a cherished classic on the Late Late Show, back when cable and satellite were in their infancy and round-the-clock movie channels a dream. The books featured frames from great vintage motion pictures blown up and presented in sequence, with the actors’ lines captioned below in a photo-graphic novel effect, the next best thing to watching the films. Included in the line were The Maltese Falcon, Ninotchka, Casablanca, Psycho, and a host of other cinema legends, which had sold briskly for a few years until the first reasonably priced videocassette players appeared in stores. For the first time, amateur aficionados were free to screen any movie or TV show they wanted anytime. The Film Classics Library paled in comparison and was discontinued.

  However, scholars like Valentino found it valuable for confirming a spoken line or a visible bit of business without having to fast-forward or backtrack through a tape or disc like a dog chasing an agile rabbit. But after turning a few pages, the movie lover in Valentino kicked in, whetting his appetite to see Frankenstein as it was intended to be seen, hearing the voices of the stage-trained cast and catching himself up in the illusion of the moving image. He closed the book, shifted the stack to the floor, and got up to rummage through the essentials of his DVD collection, spared from separate storage and arranged alphabetically by title on the built-in shelves that in The Oracle’s glory days had supported big flat cans containing reels of silver-nitrate stock. Those same shelves had yielded a complete print of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, the multiple-hour silent masterpiece that had sucked Valentino into the vortex of property ownership and architectural restoration.

  He came up with the 75th Anniversary Edition of Frankenstein, digitally remastered from the original negative, including scenes censored from 1931 showings and issued in 2006. After inspecting the disc for dust and scratches, he fed it into his DVR, which was connected to the DLP projector mounted on the ceiling and pointed through the aperture of the booth onto the poly screen he’d had installed at the front of the auditorium below. The time would come when in order to maintain the theater he would show real films via the big Bell & Howell to paying audiences, but he’d gone house-hunting to begin with to find a place to live and screen movies in all formats to aid him in research.

  For the next seventy minutes, Valentino was a boy again, holed up in his bedroom in front of a grainy TV set with his dog resting comfortably in his lap. At times the production values were creaky, and now and then a hole appeared in the plot (How did the Monster find his way back to his creator on Frankenstein’s wedding day? How did Ludwig know his daughter had been murdered and not drowned by accident? Why did Frankenstein lock his bride in her room, trapping her, with the Monster on the rampage?); but the buzz and crackle of weird electric gizmos in the brooding laboratory, the plummy vocal tones of theater actors projecting to the last row, and the dramatic, lumbering entrance of Karloff in full makeup and rig thundered over nit-picking details like a juggernaut hurtling downhill, obliterating everything in its path.

  When the windmill containing the haunted, hunted creature collapsed in flames and the end credits came on, in a single shot under the heading A GOOD CAST IS WORTH REPEATING, he realized he’d watched the entire picture without once looking for an indication of Craig Hunter’s sudden interest in it. And so he watched it again all the way through, this time with the commentary track turned on so he could hear what the experts had to say.

  James Whale’s direction held up, but at this remove it was obvious that none of the “name” players, the somewhat hammy Colin Clive, the stiff John Boles, and Mae Clarke as Clive’s timid love interest, had contributed as much to the film’s enduring legend as Jack Pierce’s groundbreaking efforts with greasepaint, collodion, and aluminum struts to create a convincing creature assembled from corpses and brought to life, and Boris Karloff’s ability, beneath all those layers of artifice and despite having no lines to speak, to move viewers with a deep sense of humanity and pathos. Edward Van Sloan, in a dynamic turn as Clive’s mentor (who except for his lack of humor bore a certain resemblance to Kyle Broadhead), made a fine cerebral foil for the furious and bewildered artificial man, who eventually made him his victim, blind brute force destroying wisdom.

  During production, after a female employee of Universal fainted at the sight of the actor in full makeup wandering the lot, Carl Laemmle, the head of the studio, had required Pierce to lead Karloff around between scenes with a heavy veil covering his features to avoid frightening any pregnant secretaries into having miscarriages. When the movie opened, ambulances were parked outside theaters in case of heart attacks among the patrons. Such stories smacked of the publicity stunt, but there was no doubt that Depression audiences were shaken by a new kind of talking feature in a landscape of frothy musicals and romantic weepies. Decades of familiarity and an ever-rising bar of cinema shock had sapped the film of much of its power to scare, but it still managed to fascinate on a first viewing, and to satisfy on a tenth. That was the definition of a classic.

  But it brought no answers. What was in it for Craig? And if, from what Horace Lysander had said, Frankenstein was key, what were biographies and filmographies of Bela Lugosi doing in the suitcase he’d left with his ex-wife? Lugosi had turned down Frankenstein, after—

  Valentino sat up straight, galvanized by the spark of an idea that had glowed dully much earlier in the day, then gone out. From among the books spread around him he excavated The Man Behind the Cape, a Lugosi biography. And found, a quarter of the way through, a long passage underlined in (he had no doubt) Craig’s unsteady hand.

  II

  WHEN THE HOUSE IS FILLED WITH DREAD

  9

  June 1931

  “IT IS GOOD to see you, Junior.”

  The Havana cigar exits the sardonically curved lips just lo
ng enough for the Hungarian to finish the greeting, then resumes its place as he grasps the hand belonging to the nervous young man with the long-toothed grin. Those lips, that intense stare, and especially the suave, sinuous accent, have chilled and seduced millions.

  “Good morning, Mr. Lugosi. I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”

  Carl Laemmle, Jr.—the most powerful man in the room, for all his youth and tiny stature—cannot help but behave like a starstruck fan. The tall Continental in the beautiful black suit towers over him by a foot, and although he is almost invariably cordial, his manner seems aloof, as though he’s been a movie star for many years instead of just four months. Few who have met him suspect the truth, that his limited command of English is responsible for his distant manner. The man is shy and somewhat suspicious of being taken advantage of, with good reason: Dracula has saved the studio from bankruptcy, but Bela Lugosi was paid only five hundred dollars for playing the lead.

  The young man turns away to welcome the two men who have entered the screening room behind the actor. Cameraman Paul Ivano, the only native-born American of the three, but who affects European ways, bows smartly; there is about the gesture a faint impression of heels clicking. Conversely, Robert Florey, a husky, six-foot-four Frenchman, stoops to pump Laemmle’s hand like a bluff Midwesterner. He is one of Hollywood’s legendary hosts, whose stock is high with every caterer, florist, and bootlegger in three counties. Both men address the twenty-three-year-old chief of production as Junior: His father, who founded the studio (and incidentally the West Coast motion picture industry), is “Uncle Carl” to everyone at Universal.