Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I called Cedars of Lebanon, but the Privacy Policy police wouldn’t tell me anything. I wouldn’t worry about her. Some people are just too nasty for the Other Side.”

  “I can’t help feeling responsible.”

  “That’s cop talk. It’s their business to make everyone guilty. You didn’t tell her to burgle your home. If she’d asked, the answer would’ve been no. Where to now, the office? Bury yourself in work?”

  “The theater. I’ve been in these clothes more than twenty-four hours, and I need to assess the damage to the projection booth.”

  “I drove past on the way to the hoosegow. The police tape is gone. Somebody must’ve robbed a bank or else they turned on the light at Krispy Kreme.” Broadhead clicked off the turn indicator, which had been clicking for five minutes. “That’s all you’re doing, I hope: changing clothes and sweeping up.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning when what you’re doing lands you in jail, it’s either time to stop doing it or choose the criminal life. I wouldn’t recommend the latter in your case. So far you’ve been caught every time.”

  “You can save the lecture. If Craig had that film, he hid it so well I wouldn’t know where to begin looking for it. Gill and Yellowfern will have turned his apartment in Long Beach inside out by now.”

  “You can’t get them all, Val.”

  “I’d like to get enough of them so that doesn’t become the department motto.”

  “If that’s your ‘I give up’ speech, it needs work.”

  “Don’t worry. I know when I’m licked.”

  “Better.”

  The Oracle looked more deserted than usual when they pulled up in front; Valentino supposed the police had turned the workers away during their investigation. He made a note to call Leo Kalishnikov and get them back. He was starting to think the place was cursed as surely as Frankenstein. Everyone connected with it seemed to have come to a no-good end starting with Max Fink, who had gone broke building it and took his own life.

  He opened the door on the passenger’s side. “You can take the car on in. If it’s as bad as they said, I won’t be in to work today.”

  “Ruth will be disappointed. She’s volunteered to act as your parole officer.” Broadhead waved good-bye and peeled away from the curb without looking, forcing a city bus to whoosh its air brakes and redistribute the passenger load from back to front.

  Valentino was reaching for the front door when it swung open. A large man he’d never seen before stood in the doorway, wearing a suit two sizes too small in the coat and a gap-toothed grin. Before Valentino could react, something hard nudged his right kidney from behind and the big man stepped aside. He had no choice but to step across the threshold.

  The man behind him followed noiselessly and pulled the door shut against the constant murmur of L.A. traffic. Valentino started to turn to get a look at him, but a blow to his solar plexus changed his mind. He emptied his lungs and groped for support at the big man’s fist. His legs were swept from under him. As he fell, a knee connected with his chin, snapping his jaw shut and chipping a tooth. That was the last thing he saw for a while. But he could hear.

  “Bust his arms?” A wheezy, broken-windpipe voice.

  “Boss said no.”

  The second voice was flat and toneless.

  Wheezy said, “Well, hell. If roughing up’s all he wanted he coulda called a couple of locals and saved us the drive up the coast.”

  “You want to kind of shut up?”

  “What for? This guy’s out like the Macarena.”

  “You ever been cold-cocked?”

  “I guess I cold-cocked my share.”

  “It ain’t the same thing. Don’t talk about stuff you don’t know nothing about.”

  Now Valentino smelled stale cigarette breath, felt the heat of a face bent close to his. The owner of the flat voice said, “Forget Frankenstein, Rudolph. Or treat yourself to a plot in Forest Lawn.”

  “Rudolph, why Rudolph?” Wheeze asked. “His nose ain’t so red.”

  “Not the reindeer, you dope. The old-time movie star. Don’t you ever watch nothing but porn?”

  The door opened on a hinge that needed oil and shut with a thump.

  Valentino had thought they’d never leave. He allowed himself to slip into unconsciousness.

  *

  His cell phone woke him. Groaning, he rolled over, worked it out of its pocket, and clenched his jaw against a wave of nausea to answer.

  “That must’ve been some party,” Harriet said. “I’ve been trying to reach you for hours. I tried the theater, your office, and your cell I don’t know how many times.”

  He’d been too preoccupied to check for missed calls when he got his phone back from the police. “I forgot it. I’ve been out running errands.” He tested his chipped tooth between thumb and forefinger. At least it wasn’t loose.

  “You sound hungover. What kind of example is that for a nice boy like Jason?”

  He’d nearly forgotten the excuse he’d given her to cover up his trip to San Diego and his meeting with Mike Grundage. “I wasn’t drinking. I was just out late. I’m sorry I didn’t call.”

  “I can nag you later, when it doesn’t cost us both minutes. Listen, I’m—”

  His phone beeped twice and went dead. No bars showed on the screen. It hadn’t been charged since yesterday morning.

  He was pulling himself up from the floor, using the wall for support, when the land line rang upstairs. It would be Harriet again. He knew he’d never reach it in time, and in point of fact he didn’t want to. At least she couldn’t know for sure he was in The Oracle. Whatever she had to tell him could wait until he’d put himself together enough to frame excuses.

  The plumbing had been restored in the women’s restroom off the foyer. He lurched inside, splashed his face with water, and let it drip as he entered the auditorium and climbed to the projection booth. He was beginning to feel a little less like the victim of a four-car pileup. Wheezy and his partner were professionals who knew how to deliver a beating that wouldn’t cripple a man.

  Which of course meant that they also knew how to deliver the other kind.

  The warning about the Frankenstein test had been redundant. Their conversation about whether to break his arms and the drive up the coast (from San Diego, where else?) had made it clear whose orders they were following and therefore why.

  The room where he kept his apartment looked even worse than it had when he’d first seen it, after many years of neglect and vermin in residence. Furniture was upended, Craig Hunter’s horror-film books were scattered, and stuffing from the slashed cushions and mattress of the sofa lay in clumps. The Bell & Howell projector, he was relieved to learn, was unharmed, although the dust cover had been snatched off to confirm the take-up reel mounted on it contained no film.

  He found the telephone on the floor, where likely an investigating officer had replaced the receiver in its cradle, and sat down amid the wreckage of the sofa with the standard in his lap to call the number on Sergeant Gill’s business card. The San Diego detective answered on the first ring and listened to Valentino’s account of his attack.

  “You’re just a trouble magnet,” Gill said when he finished. “You’re back on the street, what, twenty minutes, and you’re someone’s handball. Grundage must have a pipeline into the West Hollywood station. I doubt his hired boys came prepared to camp out indefinitely waiting for you to get sprung.”

  “You’re sure they’re from Grundage?”

  “You mean apart from that gag about breaking your arms? The one you saw sounds like Pudge Pollard. He lost his teeth tending goal for Colorado before the NHL turned him out for gambling. He wasn’t unemployed a month when Grundage recruited him. The one with the bad throat would be Dickey Wirtz. He drank a bottle of Clorox to get off the laundry detail in Folsom and threw it up before it could eat out his stomach. Dickey hangs with Pudge, who keeps him from falling down open manholes. I’ll have headquarters fax Pollard’s
mug up here so you can ID him positively, but I’m sure it’s them. At least now we know we’re on the right track with Grundage. All we have to do is prove it.”

  “Do you think it was Pollard and Wirtz who pushed Teddie Goodman down the stairs?”

  “Let’s just say you’re lucky you met them on the ground floor. You’re sure you don’t know where that film is? Evidence like that could help lock up Mike and his boys until they’re tripping over their whiskers.”

  “I’m sure.” As sure as he was that vintage film would never survive police custody.

  “Because that legal talent you have made me wonder if you had a big-time buyer all lined up.”

  “That was a favor from an old friend.”

  “I should have such friends. What I’ve got is John Yellowfern.”

  Valentino had no response for that.

  Gill said, “My guess is these characters won’t be back, but I’d change the locks. They’re way too familiar with the ones you’ve got. When I say they won’t be back, I’m assuming you’re taking their advice and forgetting all about Frankenstein.”

  “I came to that decision last night. Too many people had been hurt already.”

  “You’ve got a piece of that, Sherlock. It’s why we locked you up.” Gill broke the connection.

  Valentino got out a big garbage bag, scooped all the debris into it, and straightened up what hadn’t been destroyed. Evidently Pollard and Wirtz, or whoever had surprised Teddie in the act of ransacking the booth if not them, had decided he’d hide the film in his private apartment and not anywhere else in a building where stranger traffic was so heavy during construction. His brief acquaintance with Grundage’s men convinced him they wouldn’t have abandoned the search from panic over the implications of committing physical assault. Compared to this world, Frankenstein’s was looking less and less terrifying.

  Someone had been knocking on the front door for some time before he got down the stairs. He hesitated with his hand on the knob; perhaps his earlier visitors’ orders had changed and they’d come back to finish what they’d started. “Who is it?”

  “Special delivery.”

  It was a woman’s voice. He opened the door to reveal a husky blonde in the pale blue uniform of the United States Postal Service. She held her electronic device in one hand and carried a square package under her other arm, slightly smaller than a pizza box but twice as thick. He scratched his signature on the device’s screen with the stylus she handed him and accepted the package. He recognized the handwriting on the address. The quality of Craig Hunter’s script had deteriorated since the last time a fan had asked him for his autograph.

  Valentino’s own hands were unsteady when he closed the door and tore the paper off the package. The black metal box was stenciled “Property of Universal Studios” in white. He fumbled with the buckles that secured the woven cloth straps and found two aluminum film cans inside.

  By all rights the material should have been handled with surgical gloves, but he was too excited to go back upstairs and search for his supply among the confusion left by the burglars. He prised open one of the cans and, pulling the sleeve of his sweatshirt over one hand, unwound enough of the film to study it against the light.

  For old silver-nitrate stock it was in remarkably good condition, neither brittle nor sticky to the touch. The storage vault must have been climate-controlled. When a few feet in he recognized Bela Lugosi’s face, he wound it all back and returned it to its can. Icy tentacles slithered up his spine. He’d stared into the eyes of a dead man, and they had stared back with an evil glitter of comprehension.

  III

  THE AIR IS FILLED WITH MONSTERS

  18

  “IT’S ALIVE! IT’S alive!”

  “Henry—in the name of God!”

  “Oh—in the name of God. Now I know what it feels like to be God!”

  The screening room was light years removed from the sleek Deco comfort of the chamber where those lines had first been heard on film eighty years before. Valentino and Jason Stickley sat side by side in cramped elbow desks in the darkened Film Department classroom while Kyle Broadhead operated an extravagantly expensive air-cooled projector designed to process celluloid and silver nitrate, a combination as potentially explosive as nitro and glycerin, particularly when exposed to the heat of an incandescent bulb such as the one that threw the images onto the pull-down screen in front of the chalkboard.

  That line about God, sufficiently volatile in itself to have been censored from the theatrical release for decades, sounded tame in the monotonous cadence of the anonymous studio employee reading it from Robert Florey’s script. Dr. Frankenstein had not been cast officially until James Whale took Florey’s place behind the megaphone, bringing Colin Clive with him from England. The test had been staged to audition Edward Van Sloan as Waldman, Henry Frankenstein’s mentor, and Bela Lugosi as his creation from spare parts scrounged from cemeteries, charnel houses, and executioners’ scaffolds. Young Stickley, Valentino knew, would appreciate the last, equating it with his own forays into junkyards and whatnot shops to pimp up his Victorian costumes for Steampunk events. In any case, the intern had earned his invitation to the screening by providing physical and moral support during Valentino’s visit to The Grotto.

  Today, Jason wore ordinary blue jeans raveling at the knees and a white T-shirt that exposed the piston rods or whatever they were tattooed inside his arms and what resembled a camshaft up his spine, visible through the thin porous cotton. School was in session, and the frock coat and remodeled top hat were inappropriate to the occasion.

  Lugosi’s close-up a few minutes into the second reel—the one Valentino had happened to unspool first at The Oracle—was arresting, but only for the hypnotic quality of his eyes, forever associated with his signature role as Dracula. His makeup was atrocious. Whatever foundation he’d applied to replicate the glazed appearance of a figure molded from clay gave his face a slimy sheen, as of a stage actor who had used cold cream to cleanse away greasepaint after a performance, and his oversize page-boy wig made him look like a small boy dressed up as Prince Valiant or, worse, Buster Brown. Although he could well understand Junior Laemmle’s hilarious reaction to the absurd image, Valentino was saddened by it. But then he had the advantage of knowing the long string of humiliations that would follow the actor for the next quarter century.

  The sentimentalist in him wished Florey’s command to burn the reels had been carried out, rather than pile one more indignity on Lugosi in his grave. But the archivist in him knew they represented a chapter of Hollywood history that must be preserved.

  “Lights, please,” Broadhead said.

  Jason sprang to his feet and palmed up the switches beside the door, flickering the ceiling fluorescents into life.

  “What did you think, young man?” The professor’s tone belonged to one of his infrequent lectures. “Your generation’s perspective is occasionally of value and invariably amusing.”

  “It was interesting.”

  “Only historically. A Depression audience would have laughed it out of the theater. When I ask an honest question I expect the answer to be equally straightforward. Flattery never taught me anything, aside from the miracle of my birth, and I was already aware of that.”

  “Well, the acting was kind of crummy.”

  “It was worse than that, but the fellow in the lab coat probably painted sets and Van Sloan was a money player, holding his stuff in reserve for when it counted. Lugosi was the picture in their frame. What, I repeat, did you think?”

  “I thought he was bogus.”

  “Precisely. You and your peers have done the language an enormous service by returning that word to the vocabulary. Transparent fakery is the only unpardonable sin in an industry built on bunk.”

  “I meant he was bad.”

  “I know. But if you use a term wrong often enough, the law of averages guarantees that eventually it will describe the situation.”

  “Don’t bully the boy
,” Valentino said. “He’s right. Lugosi was fake and bad. His leaving the production was the best thing that could have happened to it. Karloff might have gone on playing hoods and religious fanatics until his contract ran out, and Frankenstein would be one more forgotten failure from the Golden Age.”

  “It’s a shame the crazy Hungarian didn’t live long enough to walk out on The English Patient.”

  Valentino asked him just what he had against that film that hundreds of critics hadn’t.

  “Call me old-fashioned, but I preferred Casablanca when the hero gave up his lady love for the cause of freedom rather than the other way around.” Broadhead pierced his lips with the stem of his pipe, but he was too aware of the properties of the material spinning off the take-up reel to stuff the bowl with tobacco and light it.

  “So is it ours now?” Jason asked.

  Valentino said, “Technically it still belongs to Universal. The old studio system would never have surrendered rights to an individual.”

  Broadhead said, “We’d be better off dealing with Grundage and his goons.”

  “In this case, I think we’d encounter less resistance from the current stockholders than we would from him. We’d have to prove his father came by it illegally, and even then an experienced attorney like Horace Lysander would make a case for rightful ownership based on eighty years of continuous possession.”

  “Sort of how we’ve still got Manhattan.”

  Broadhead smiled. “I told you you’d like this child. His term papers were no more accurate than the common lot, but original thinking prevailed.”

  Valentino rose and crossed the room to the wall-mounted telephone. “I need to make an appointment with Smith Oldfield in Legal.”

  “Don’t discuss details over the wire. Racketeers tap phones just like the FBI, and next time Frick and Frack won’t be satisfied with just chipping a tooth.”

  *

  Smith Oldfield was a native New Englander who dressed like an English country gentleman in an Ealing film. His moss-colored Harris tweed was acceptably shabby, as if it had been broken in by a manservant, and his gray knitted four-in-hand matched his temples. As far as Valentino knew, he’d never set foot in a courtroom; that called for skills in oratory and theater that his soft speech and quiet mannerisms did not reflect, and in any case he prided himself on the kind of homework and gentle negotiating that made it unnecessary to enter into an open forum. He wore eyeglasses with heavy black rims, but instead of looking naked and vulnerable when he removed them, his pale blue eyes resembled Toledo steel unsheathed from the scabbard.