Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

  “The situation is similar to a permanent easement,” he said, folding a pair of well-kept hands on the leather top of a desk bare of paperwork. It wasn’t that he hadn’t any, only that he preferred to spare his visitors the sordid spectacle of the law in actual practice. At cocktail parties, when a dry gin martini had loosened his tongue, he compared it to sausage manufacture. “Common law is a contrary creature, prognostically speaking,” he told Valentino. “The decision varies from judge to judge, and some judges contradict their own precedents. Further, there is the question of how the film came into your hands. If your late friend removed it without authorization from a storage unit leased in Grundage’s name, Grundage can obtain a warrant and reclaim it.”

  “His father may have stolen it himself. Do two wrongs make a right?”

  “Not in the statutes, in so many words. But in this situation only one tenth of the law argues against it. Frankly, I wouldn’t take those odds to court.”

  Valentino, who knew Oldfield for a cautious man but not a timid one, felt his heart sink. He’d hoped for one of those judicial miracles the lawyer had delivered in the past.

  “There is another question to consider.” Now the glasses came off, exposing the twin blades of his eyes. “That is the fact that the police may seize the film as evidence in a homicide and two assaults.”

  “One, if I decide not to press charges in my case. Mr. Oldfield, this is a privileged communication, is it not?”

  “Of course. Nothing discussed in this office leaves it without the client’s consent.”

  Valentino leaned forward and folded his arms on his edge of the desk. “The police don’t know I have the film. If it’s taken and kept under the conditions usually reserved for evidence, for the amount of time usually required to secure an arrest and a conviction, its integrity will be compromised beyond repair.”

  “Forty years is the record, and that was a civil suit over property. Your concern is understandable.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I didn’t say it was supportable in a court of law. As an officer of the court, I cannot advise you to withhold information or material evidence from the authorities except when it touches upon your Fifth Amendment rights, which the film does not.”

  “I have no choice. I’m committed to my profession by ethics and behavior, just as you are to yours. My client is the UCLA Film Preservation program. The only difference is I’m not protected by law. Strictly speaking, sir, who has those two reels won’t affect the investigation one way or the other. If someone’s arrested and the prosecution needs it to make its case, I can print it on safety stock and surrender the original, but that takes time. Sergeant Gill and Detective Yellowfern aren’t patient men.”

  “I’d advise you against it. That would constitute the assumption of legal possession. You could be tried as an accessory after the fact, the fact being grand theft.”

  “I was afraid you’d say something like that.”

  Oldfield smiled thinly and put his glasses back on. “No one ever likes to hear what a lawyer has to say. You’re not going to take my advice, are you?”

  “About not making a new print, yes. I’ve been known to bend the law, but the only time I actually broke it I paid a fine and got two points on my driver’s license.” Valentino shook his head. “I can’t negotiate with Grundage as long as there’s any question about how I came by that film, and I can’t stand by while it’s mistreated by the system. I thought I could, for once, but that was before I actually had it. I should have known myself better than that.”

  “You must not take what I’m about to say as any kind of advice, legal or personal. If you do and it comes out, I’ll deny I said it. I’m nearing retirement age and have no intention of ending my career with disbarment.”

  “As you said, nothing leaves this office.” He felt a surge of hope.

  “What you need is a devious mind. It so happens we have one of those under contract to this university.”

  Hope ran out of him like air from a punctured balloon. “I’d really be grateful if you didn’t say the name.”

  “Very well. I happen to know that he plays miniature golf at a place called Bob-o-Links in the Valley about this time once a week. It should be an excellent place to carry on a conversation you wouldn’t want the administration overhearing.” The attorney got up and extended his hand. “Good luck.”

  Valentino took it. “I’ll need more than luck this time around.”

  “I wasn’t referring to your dilemma. I meant good luck shooting against him. He cheats.”

  19

  BOB-O-LINKS SPORTED AN electric sign over the gate depicting a cartoon bird with a putter-shaped head dipping and raising its beak like one of those perpetual-motion office toys executives use to mesmerize visitors. Valentino bought his admission, rented a canary yellow putter and a bucket of balls, and joined Henry Anklemire at the third hole. The little assistant director of Information Services wore a green sweater too tight for his rotundity, electric-blue knickers, orange argyles, and a purple tam-o-shanter with a pompon on top, an outfit that guaranteed him a job if the management ever tired of the bird on the sign.

  The park, which was on the National Register of Historic Places, had a show-business theme that hadn’t been updated since its founding in the 1950s. Howdy Doody’s puppet mouth opened and closed, alternately accepting and rejecting balls rolled its way, a bear crouching in front of Davy Crockett’s cabin cuffed at them as they approached the door, and painted plywood cutouts directing the players between obstacles looked like Troy Donahue and a host of others who had flashed in their pans too briefly and too long ago for even Valentino to connect them to their names. A chip shot that landed between Jayne Mansfield’s breasts was worth fifty points.

  Anklemire, chomping a black cigar that smelled like burning tires, spent a full minute phantom-putting before he knocked his ball through ten feet of zigzag tin pipe and between Jiminy Cricket’s spats. “Ha! Take that, you little cock-a-roach.” He shifted his cigar to the opposite corner of his mouth and grinned around it, twirling his putter like a baton. “Hey, there, Professor. Care to take a whack?” The PR flack thought everyone outside his department was faculty.

  He took a half-hearted swipe at a rented ball and missed the pipe. “I’m no athlete. Not even the miniature kind.”

  “Probably means you’re good in the sack. How’s tricks? Find the Casablanca director’s cut, Bogie and Bergman fly off business class and leave her hubby, the stiff, to the Nazis?”

  “Something like that.” He gave him an abridged version of recent events.

  “Horror stuff, huh? Swell. Lookit the box office all them teenage vampires are doing. Personally, actors that live on Gummie Bears and Clearasil make me heave, but I ain’t exactly the demographic. What you do, you stick yours on the extra disc. It don’t matter if nobody ever watches it; you still get a hunk of the action on the bloodsucker flick.”

  “But it isn’t about vampires.”

  “No biggie. You say on the box Lugosi’s the star of the greatest vampire picture ever made. You say they shot it on the Dracula set?”

  “Yes. All the original cobwebs were still in place.”

  “Bingo! The screen’s greatest vampire returns to the vampire’s castle. Vampire, vampire, vampire, how many times can you say it before it gets old? Never, that’s how many! Oh, you can’t make this stuff up.”

  “You just did.”

  “I thought this job was gonna be dull. You’re a press agent’s dream: Tiger Woods, only without all the fooling around.” He took a swipe at Clarabell the Clown’s nose, missed, and marked it on his scorecard as a success. Anklemire was the only person Valentino had ever met who cheated at miniature golf, and he was playing himself. “Brother, I love this sport: fresh air, exercise, and you don’t go broke on caddies and equipment.”

  “You’re sticking the cart in front of the horse. You can’t promote the film until we have it free and clear.”

  “Gang
sters are just businessmen with flashier broads. Cut a deal.”

  “The police want it, too, and it won’t cost them a cent, just the half hour it takes to swear out a warrant.”

  “Well, then, you know what you got to do.”

  “Turn it over?”

  “Cripes, no! My old man taught me you never give up nothing for free gratis, except to B’nai B’rith. You got to go out and nail the murderer.”

  Valentino, whose swing had begun, missed Clarabelle by yards, striking Roy Rogers’ horse Trigger two holes away in a spot that would deny the world a Trigger, Jr.

  “I’ll give you that one,” Anklemire said, writing on the card. “Yowtch.”

  “I’m supposed to beat the entire San Diego Police Department to the punch?”

  “You already done it with Beverly Hills and the LAPD. All them boys down by the border know how to do is break up cockfights.”

  “That’s vaguely racist.”

  The little man carefully removed his tam and scratched his scalp through a toupee formerly owned by Kevin Spacey. “I’m a sleazebag, Professor. It’s why I’m so good at my job, just like you’re good at yours. Everything we got to do to do it ain’t in the description. Come on; you know you want to.” He uncovered his dentures in a too-perfect grin. Although still well short of middle age, the career ad man had worn himself out from both ends and semi-retired from the high-pressure world of Madison Avenue to his present position with cases of pyorrhea and hemorrhoids severe enough to attract the attention of a medical journal. He’d accepted a more meager salary in return for a superior health plan.

  “Why is it everyone I know seems to think I enjoy playing Charlie Chan? Just once I’d like to make a discovery of genuine historical value that doesn’t involve a corpse.”

  “I wouldn’t knock it. I don’t know a man in my line of work that wouldn’t commit a little murder to get a mention in two sections of the L.A. Times.” Anklemire tugged his hat back on, rolled a ball down a plastic trough between the turning vanes of a dwarf windmill, and got a mechanical Liberace to come out and take a bow.

  The Black Sleep: appropriate title.

  It is a role one could walk through in his pyjamas, a deaf-mute performing errands that at most studios would bill him only in the closing credits, if at all; United Artists—bless the second string—has pledged to treat him better, but still he will follow John Carradine, Lon Chaney, Jr., and even Sally Whoever, a nobody, which given UA’s standing is almost as bad. Chaney is drunk most of the time, and horses around on the set. Casmir—such is the name of Bela’s own character—has lived to see both Carradine and Chaney poach the role he created, making a mockery of it in House of Dracula and Son of Dracula, and now, twenty-five years after he turned his back on Frankenstein because the part was silent, he is forced to accept another without a single line. His pleas to be granted the power of speech if not hearing have brought half-hearted assurances from the director, but a promise without conviction isn’t worthy of the name; this much, at least, he has learned about English, infuriatingly elusive language that it is. On the Hungarian stage he mastered Shakespeare in translation, but in America he can scarcely order a hamburger.

  Not that he could keep one down if it were served to him. His stay in the sanitarium has flushed the morphine from his system and deadened the urge to return to it, but it has left him with no appetite and a system that can barely tolerate weak tea and pale toast. When Basil Rathbone and the others queue up at a catering table laden with sweetmeats, roasts, and heavy cream, the scent of the rich food alone is enough to drive him to his dressing room, which he shares with Akim Tamiroff. The first swig from the bottle settles his stomach. The rest will prepare him for the next take.

  The production will not wrap for a week, and already it is quaintly out of date. Giant grasshoppers are the monsters of the moment, the heroes men in lab coats, characters who in his prime were the villains. To a man these players are as bland as his tea and toast, offering none of the quirks and bits of stage business he brought to the mad Dr. Mirakle in Murders in the Rue Morgue, the feature to which he and Florey fled from Frankenstein.

  Frankenstein, always Frankenstein, ever and again until the end. What is Karloff doing these days? The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday, reading selections from Poe. Another property poached.

  He glimpses his face in the mirror above the tiny sink, the dead gray hair falling over his temple, folds of skin hanging beneath his chin like the rotted drapes in Castle Dracula. He raises the bottle, gumming a grin at the reflection. “Good evening,” he says, in the rich baritone he can still muster when the cough is not rattling his lungs. “Thank you, but I never drink—wine.” And pours whiskey down his throat.

  *

  The daydream ended when the movie did and the menu popped back up onscreen. Valentino turned off the player and the laser projector, returning the auditorium to shadow. Lugosi had been wrong about his last role but one. (Plan 9 from Outer Space would not appear until three years after his death.) Small-budget studio that it was then, United Artists had breathed new life into the horror genre, reviving the faltering careers of classic stars like Rathbone and Carradine and providing viewers with a respite from the thunderous science fiction programmers of the Atomic Age, with their elephantine insects and heavy-handed apocalyptic themes. The ailing actor’s turn as the mute Casmir was moving and tragically sympathetic, reminiscent of both the visual poetry of the silent cinema and Boris Karloff’s performance in Frankenstein. It had been the last brilliant spurt of flame among the embers.

  Valentino smiled sadly in the darkness of the projection booth. Ironically, Karloff had argued against giving the Monster the ability to speak in Bride of Frankenstein, insisting that it would destroy audience empathy, and had pleaded to strike all his lines from the script; surely a unique request in an ego-driven profession. He, too, had been overridden, but like Lugosi, he had been wrong. While his rival’s valedictory effort had been overlooked, Karloff’s semi-articulate artificial man was met with huge success in theaters and among critics. (“The Monster Talks!” advertisements proclaimed, echoing the success of “Garbo Speaks!”) From start to finish, the two European artists had mirrored each other’s career in reverse images, meteors whose trajectories had crossed moving in opposite directions. What a strange and arbitrary country was Hollywood.

  It was questionable whether Bela Lugosi had seen his last onscreen appearance in life. The Black Sleep premiered in June 1956, and he died in August. Karloff, so the legend went, paid his colleague the ultimate compliment at his visitation, where he lay in state in one of the cloaks he had worn as Count Dracula: “You wouldn’t be fooling us, would you, Bela?”

  Lugosi, most probably, would not have accepted the remark in the spirit in which it was intended. Dry Anglo-Saxon wit was lost on demonstrative Hungarians. In any case, a quarter-century in the West Coast meat-grinder had bled him of whatever sense of humor he had brought to it.

  The land line rang. Without switching on a light, he read the caller ID in the glow of the LED, and felt a cold hand on the back of his neck, as from the grave: After two years Lorna Hunter hadn’t gotten around to having Craig’s name removed from the number.

  “Val, I’m sorry to disturb you. Are you busy?”

  He hesitated. Her words were slurred. Had he lost one alcoholic friend only to replace him with another? “No. Are you all right?”

  “Actually, I’m not. Can you come over?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Please? I haven’t spoken to another living soul in person in days. I really have to see you.”

  He calculated the driving time by the standards of homebound L.A. traffic. What he really needed was a calendar. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  Ice cubes tinkled against glass on her end. “Try to make it sooner, okay?”

  He managed to shave five minutes off his original estimate. A truck driver and the chauffeur of a white stretch limo were two people he no sooner wished to mee
t again on foot than Pudge Pollard and Dickey Wirtz.

  He’d barely touched the doorbell when the door opened and she fell against him. He had to put his arms around her to steady himself. He smelled gin—no tonic—and he was uncomfortably aware that she wore nothing beneath a yellow silk kimono that reached barely to her thighs. The warmth of her was overpowering. “Thank God,” she said. “Thank God. I was afraid you’d decided not to come.” She raised her face as if for a kiss.

  He took her chin between thumb and forefinger and forced it away as gently as possible, which wasn’t too gently; he was alarmed. Her makeup was streaked, and for a terrible moment he thought she was bruised. Had she had a visit similar to his? He asked again if she was all right.

  The roughness of his handling seemed to bring her out of whatever fog she was in. She shuddered in his arms and straightened, pushing herself away. A hand went to her hair, smoothing it back from where it had fallen about her face. There were no marks, except for bluish circles beneath her eyes. She nodded. “I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just that I need a friend.”

  “Has something happened?”

  “No. The phone keeps ringing, that’s all. They don’t leave messages. I guess they’ve given up on my ever calling them back. They’re getting less persistent. Craig isn’t that big of a story. They’re more interested in who killed Michael Jackson’s giraffes.”

  He was surprised reporters were still calling at all. Hunter’s name seemed to have slipped clear off the air. But he didn’t say that. “Where do you keep the coffee? I’m sorry to be blunt, but you stink at drinking.”