Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

“He invited me to the Grotto for dinner. I was going to tell you about it later.”

  “How much later?” Yellowfern snapped.

  “Time enough for that,” said his partner. “One of your neighbors called in a possible B-and-E. Someone was prowling around inside with a flashlight. They saw it through the windows.”

  “What’s a breaking-and-entering in West Hollywood have to do with San Diego Homicide?” The reason for the crime was clear to him now. Grundage, suspecting Craig had given him the test reels for safekeeping, had lured him far enough out of town to give his people in L.A. time to search the theater. Gill and Yellowfern would have heard the report on their radio and investigated it on a hunch, based on the location.

  The sergeant said, “I said that’s how it was called in. It’s a little more than that now.” He made a beckoning gesture with his finger.

  Valentino followed the pair into the auditorium, where the recently rewired crystal chandelier made a pond of light reaching the base of the staircase to the projection booth. The door to it was open and something lay at the foot.

  The woman was sprawled in an impossible position. She was dressed exotically even by entertainment-capital standards, in brilliant red and midnight black, the waist cut narrow and the shoulders square. Her face was in the shadow of the stairwell, but Valentino could spot Teddie Goodman, his arch-rival, under any circumstances.

  16

  AS HE WAS staring, a foot twitched at the end of a shattered leg and a low, heartbreaking moan issued from the shadow of the stairwell. Valentino looked at the detectives, horror-stricken.

  “Yeah,” Yellowfern said. “We lucked out. In six months she’ll be able to tell us who helped her down the stairs, if she doesn’t croak first.”

  Gill was more human. “The ambulance is on its way. We can’t move her till then.” Just as he finished speaking, a siren gulped into the block.

  “Can’t you cover her with a blanket or something? I heard you do that for shock.”

  “Not till the EMS crew says. You never know with internal injuries. It’s tough, but that’s how it is. You know her?” Gill touched the arm of an LAPD officer, stopping him on his way past. “Let’s have a light.”

  Valentino looked at the face in the glow of the officer’s flash, just to be sure. It was turned to one side. A virulent purple bruise had blossomed up from her cheek, swelling and closing the eye. He clutched his stomach, sorry he’d eaten such a big meal.

  “Her name is Theodosia Burr Goodman. She works for Mark David Turkus.”

  “The skillionaire?” Yellowfern said. “What’s she do for him?”

  “The same thing I do for UCLA, only for a lot more money. Where’s that ambulance crew?”

  Gill said, “Calm down, we haven’t been here long. If she’s making such big bucks, what’s she doing breaking in places?”

  A man and a woman wearing Emergency Medical Services uniforms came in carrying equipment and a stretcher. Valentino and the detectives moved out of their way. “Could we talk about this someplace else?”

  Yellowfern said, “When the coast is clear, we can go up to your nice comfortable apartment, only there’s no place to sit. Your girlfriend or somebody else trashed it good. Either that, or you’re one rotten housekeeper.”

  His first fear was for the Bell & Howell projector. Then he felt shame for worrying about an inanimate thing while the attendants were examining Teddie’s vital signs. By silent consent the three moved down the aisle until they found adjoining seats whose cotton batting generations of nest-building mice had not yet thoroughly plundered. Valentino, of course, sat in the center.

  Gill had his notebook out. “The way it looks right now, someone came in on her while she was tossing the place and gave her a shove. That made you a suspect, but I can’t remember the last time anyone named a gangster as his alibi.”

  “You can ask my intern, Jason Stickley. He was with me. One of your men sent him home.”

  “Not one of ours,” snarled Yellowfern.

  “We screw up, too. The order was to bring in Valentino.” Gill pointed his pen at the archivist. “You can give us contact info on the intern later. Maybe Grundage’ll back you up, although based on experience he wouldn’t tell the pizza guy his address when he was ordering. We’ll get to what you were doing with him. What was your girlfriend looking for?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend. She works for the competition. She thought I was on the trail of something Turkus would want. Maybe she thought I had it, or that she could find out what it was and where to look for it if she went through my things.”

  Yellowfern chuckled nastily and propped his feet on the back of the seat in front of him. “Sounds like true love to me.”

  “Shut up, John. What’d she think you had?”

  He sighed and told them about the Frankenstein test; about everything connected with it, starting with June 1931 through Craig Hunter all the way to that evening. He’d already made up his mind to come clean. One person had died, another might yet. It wasn’t worth it for thirty or forty minutes of film.

  For once, Yellowfern was speechless. While Valentino was talking he placed his feet back on the floor and leaned forward and twisted in his seat to stare at him, knuckles whitening on the arm. It was Gill who spoke, with cold fury in his voice.

  “I hope you get the same job in San Quentin. Those cons can use a break from Horton Hears a Who!. You’re still a suspect in my book. You threw this Goodman woman down those stairs just the same as if you were here.”

  “It was all guesswork until tonight,” Valentino said. “It didn’t even count as evidence. I didn’t really believe the film existed until Lysander told me it was stolen. I only had an old man’s word he’d held that sample strip in his hand, and the word of a half-crazed collector at that.”

  Gill shook his head. “You’ve been running around grilling our witnesses, and one we didn’t even know about. Anyone who had contact with Hunter just before he died is material. We’ll start with interfering and work our way up to obstruction.”

  “Don’t forget accessory after the fact.” Yellowfern had found his tongue.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  Valentino looked to Gill, the reasonable one, for mercy. But the sergeant had turned his head to summon an officer. When the man in uniform came, he said, “This man is under arrest. Truss him up and read him his rights.”

  Which was how Valentino found himself in jail for the first time in his life.

  *

  In holding, anyway. His cell in the West Hollywood station of the Los Angeles Police Department was small but clean, and the cot looked tempting, but he used his one call on Kyle Broadhead.

  “Have you been arraigned?” Broadhead was always calm, always practical.

  “No. I’m not even sure what the charge is. It seems there’s a menu to choose from.”

  “I can’t bail you out until bail is set. I’m afraid you’re in for the night. Do you want me to call Harriet?”

  “God, no.”

  “Didn’t tell her what you were up to, did you?”

  “She thinks I’m at a party.”

  “I bet Fanta breakfast in bed you wouldn’t. She’s the winner there, though. You’ve tasted my cooking.”

  “You know, your sense of humor doesn’t always fix things.”

  “That’s what Fanta says. I’ll see what I can do, but you’ll have to make the best of it till morning.”

  “I suppose I deserve this, with Teddie in intensive care or worse.”

  “You don’t have a crystal ball. Also, you didn’t invite her to burgle your home. She made that decision all by herself.”

  He lowered his voice. It was a busy precinct, with uniformed and plainclothes officers drifting back and forth past the bars. “Do you think it was Grundage’s henchmen?”

  “You need to brush up on your post–Hays Office vernacular. I seriously doubt anyone on his payroll writes henchman in the ‘occupation’ blank in Form 1040
. Maybe she slipped.”

  “Gill and Yellowfern are pretty certain she was pushed.”

  “Don’t believe in accidents; how Freudian. Don’t fret over it. Teddie wouldn’t, if the shoe were on the other foot.”

  “I’d never commit a crime just to lay hands on a film.”

  “Spoken by a man in the hoosegow for doing just that. I know some people. I’ll make some calls.”

  “What do I do meanwhile?”

  “Learn to play the harmonica.”

  *

  He’d hoped for some glimpse of Sergeant Clifford, a West Hollywood criminal investigator who was not exactly a friend, but at least a familiar face, but either the tall runway-model type was off duty or had been reassigned, because all he saw were strangers.

  He was gripping the bars. He’d always wondered why prisoners did that in movies, but now he knew it was to cling as closely as possible to freedom as the barriers permitted. When his fingers cramped, he rested his wrists on the cross bars with his hands dangling outside, palms down; his hands, at least, were at liberty. He fought exhaustion as long as he could, not wanting to surrender himself to the depths of his incarceration, but at last his body surrendered in protest. He retreated to the cot and gentle darkness swaddled him.

  When he opened his eyes, daylight had softened the harsh white of the fluorescents in the ceiling and someone had drawn up a desk chair to sit facing his cell. The man was an aging adolescent type, wearing an argyle sweater vest over a pink shirt, khakis in need of pressing, and what must have been the last pair of PF Flyers gym shoes on the planet. His ginger-colored hair looked as if he cut it himself, with a cowlick sticking up from his crown, and his eyes were furtive behind tortoiseshell glasses, like those of a boy too shy to maintain eye contact.

  He was one of the ten richest men in the world, and had recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday by paying for a seat on the space shuttle.

  “Please don’t be offended when I don’t offer my hand,” he said in a voice barely above a murmur. “That’s how disease is spread.”

  Valentino swung his feet to the floor and brushed back his hair with both hands, as if sleeping on it would have made it any untidier than his visitor’s. “How do you do, Mr. Turkus?”

  Mark David Turkus’ smile was tentative, oddly innocent. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember if we’ve met.”

  “We haven’t, but your face isn’t exactly unknown.” It had appeared on the cover of Forbes when he’d sold all his Internet stock just before the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, and again when he’d bought the early film library of every major studio in Hollywood. He’d started Supernova International in his parents’ basement at age twenty-six and now it had offices on five continents.

  As Turkus seemed to search for an appropriate response, Valentino asked him about Teddie Goodman.

  “She’s critical but stable; the doctors at Cedars of Lebanon got her blood pressure to stop dropping and are draining blood from the abdominal cavity. She has many broken bones, of course, including her left cheek and eye orbit. I’m flying in specialists, but there will be months of therapy and cosmetic procedures. That was a steep flight of stairs.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “I’m the one who should apologize. I haven’t been as curious as I should have been about how she gets results.”

  “The police are holding me responsible.”

  “They insist on assigning responsibility for everything. The world’s more random than that.”

  “I’m not so sure they’re wrong in this case. Teddie and I have had our differences, but I never wished her harm. She might not be where she is if I’d come forward.”

  “And if I’d been on the ball, Citizen Kane wouldn’t have gone to Ted Turner. Regret is a useless emotion. You can’t change the past, but you can affect the future.”

  Valentino said nothing, waiting. Turkus leaned back in his borrowed chair, bent one leg, and clasped his hands around it just below the knee, exposing a sagging white gym sock and three inches of pale ankle. “My attorney is at City Hall, waiting for a writ for your release. The police can hold you for forty-eight hours without charging you, but there’s no reason you should sit here going stale while the Frankenstein test is floating around out there somewhere.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Although he could guess.

  “Don’t worry. Teddie’s job is safe, and she’ll have the best people working around the clock on her case. Her iron will, I’m confident, will do the rest. I’m offering you ten percent of the gross profits for exhibition, sales, and rentals of the property if you can deliver it for a million or less.”

  “I can’t do that, sir. I’m a paid consultant for the UCLA Film Preservation Department. It would be a conflict of interest.”

  “They can’t possibly match this offer.”

  “I’m afraid that’s irrelevant.”

  “Would your conscience be clearer if I put it on a hiring basis? I’ll need a replacement for Teddie until she’s ready to return to work. After that you’ll perform as a team. There are too many properties wandering around lost out there for one person to track down. It makes no sense that the two best scouts in the business are operating in competition, duplicating each other’s efforts. That’s bureaucratic thinking. You’re leaving one position for another that pays much better, with more opportunity for advancement. That’s not betrayal, just good capitalism.”

  “It still feels wrong. I began this search as a representative of the university.”

  “The job includes the company jet whenever I’m not using it, and a town car for your personal use. A medical plan U.S. senators can only dream about.”

  “I owe two more payments on my compact and I’m accustomed to flying economy. As for the medical plan, I guess I’ll just have to take good care of myself.”

  “You realize what you’re turning down.”

  “I’m trying not to think about that, Mr. Turkus.”

  He scowled. Then he unclasped his knee and lowered his foot to the floor. “Well, I’m not a vindictive man. I’ll go through with that writ.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I have friends who are looking out for me.”

  “Not all friends are equal; lawyers certainly aren’t. I’m offering you a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

  “Thank you, but it isn’t exactly free, is it?”

  The tycoon’s shy smile broke the surface. “You’re wise in your generation.”

  Valentino felt himself returning the smile. “Ernest Thesiger. Bride of Frankenstein. Wrong film.”

  “They’re all the same to me. Movies are an investment, not a passion.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “For what?” Turkus was standing now, a lanky six-foot-two despite his stoop. “You’ve refused all my favors.”

  “For making me feel better about it. With me, they are a passion.”

  “You may be right. I’d probably fire you in the end.”

  “It’s more than probable.”

  The billionaire leaned forward. His smile now was wicked. “But what a severance package.”

  17

  “AS IT TURNS out,” Broadhead said, “most of the friends I thought I had in this town are dead. The others are good only for reminiscing. I hate reminiscing. This is the best I could do.”

  The best he could do was a criminal attorney who had secured the acquittals of more than half the celebrated felons in Hollywood, a sly-faced former NFL first-draft choice. He wore a chinchilla coat—in a Southern California autumn—over a suit spun from virgins’ hair and showed diamond grillwork when he smiled, which was more or less constantly.

  “Don’t sign the receipt till you count the money in your wallet,” he said. “I’m just saying.” He winked at the officer behind the bulletproof glass, who shot him a poisonous look back and snatched the receipt from under the last stroke of the pen in Valentino’s hand.

  The former prisoner distributed his belongings among their various poc
kets. “I can’t afford him. I’m sure you can’t either, asset to the institution though you are.”

  “You’d be surprised: a nickel here, a nickel there. I haven’t bought a suit since Nixon. But I wouldn’t spend a penny on the best lawyer in America if I were up for high treason. As far as I’m concerned, the serpent slithered out of Eden right behind Adam and Eve and hung out his shingle. No offense, Counselor.”

  “None taken, I assure you. There are days I can’t stand my own company.” Diamonds twinkled.

  “Then, who—?”

  “Fanta,” Broadhead said. “You can’t overestimate the allowance an ambassador can offer her daughter when she counts her euros.”

  “Kyle, I can’t accept.”

  “Sure you can. We’ll write it off as the bridegroom’s traditional gift to his best man. She never touches a penny. It goes into blue chip stock and keeps on growing obscenely, like an obese child playing Grand Theft Auto.” Suddenly serious, he said, “I’ve been, don’t forget. A holding cell in West Hollywood is a Hilton Garden Inn compared to a craphole in Zagreb, but it’s all the same when you want to go out for air and they won’t let you.”

  Valentino shook hands with the attorney, who said, “This is the end of it. Cops don’t get the chance to scare the pants off square citizens often. When you call their bluff they generally go away and lean on some schnook with a rap sheet as long as Baja. Just in case they don’t.” He produced a card with a magician’s flourish—Valentino swore he actually conjured it from inside his French cuff—and vanished in a cloud of glitter and chinchilla hair. The archivist wondered if he’d been there at all.

  Broadhead seemed to understand. “He’s just a special effect, animatronics and computer generation. He sleeps in a prop room, up on a hook. Let’s away.”

  They left the station in Valentino’s compact, Broadhead behind the wheel, punishing the gears and using the indicators in the middle of lane changes to confirm for other drivers the decision he’d already acted upon. Horns serenaded his every move. Under normal circumstances his passenger would have been perched on the edge of his seat, gripping the dash and tromping on phantom pedals on his side of the car. But movement was freedom. He subsided into the cushions, watching the scenery stutter past. “Any news on Teddie?”