“I don’t know if I have that many minutes.”
“I’ll pay for the extra.”
“I didn’t mean that.” His tone was plaintive. “It’s prepaid. It cuts off when my time runs out.”
Whiz, sprawled across three laps in the backseat, said, “This is why we like Victoriana.”
“Here.” Pat Pend, behind the wheel, excavated an unadorned model from a waistcoat pocket and handed it to Jason. He gave the number to Valentino, who punched it into the memory.
“If things turn sour, call the police,” he said.
“What if they take away your phone?” asked Jason.
“Wait fifteen minutes, then call the police.”
“Fifteen minutes is a long time.”
“It’s just right if everything goes smoothly. Any less is risky. It wouldn’t be smart to startle them with sirens just when we’re making the exchange.”
“There wouldn’t have to be sirens. We outnumber these guys three to one.”
Valentino pushed his face close to the boy’s. “Do not go in, understand? No matter what. These men are killers. They’re what the police are for. When things go wrong, nobody calls the Steampunks.”
“You did.”
A chorus of agreement came from the other seats.
And I pray I don’t regret it. Aloud he said, “You know where this place is in case we get separated?”
Jason’s teeth glistened in the light from a streetlamp. “I’d be one lousy film student if I didn’t.”
Valentino decided, if he survived the night, to ask his department head to appoint this boy—this young man—to a salaried position. Anyone who could make him smile under those circumstances was worth keeping around.
21
THE HOLLYWOOD WAX Museum was one of Valentino’s favorite haunts, a place to go and revisit the giants of his Movie Channel youth in 3-D—the real thing, without a cumbersome pair of glasses coming in between. The white stucco building with its electric marquee-type sign was an ancient institution by local standards: Its oldest figures from the silent age had modeled for the sculptors in person. When the season sagged beneath ponderous special effects and actors with crow’s-feet playing horny high school students, the archivist would bring a sack lunch and dine with Francis X. Bushman, Blanche Sweet, and Rin Tin Tin.
But at that hour, with the sign switched off and Hollywood Boulevard as deserted as any street ever got in a major metropolitan area (he’d heard stories of coyotes slinking down from the hills and prowling the Walk of Fame), the museum appeared anything but friendly, a mortuary reflecting the smog-muted starlight from its pale front. A box that had once held a Magic Chef electric range slouched on the corner, providing sleeping quarters for one or more of the L.A. homeless, modern-day Bedouins who folded their tents and stole away come the dawn. Whatever they witnessed during the night vanished with them.
The Hummer had turned off a block short of the address, as arranged, and Valentino had his choice of parking spaces. He pulled up directly in front of the arched entrance so he and Lorna could make their escape as quickly as possible. Or so he prayed.
He remembered to call Pat Pend’s number, and after a quick exchange with Jason, left the line open and slid the phone into the slash pocket of his Windbreaker. Despite the delays he’d reached his destination with four minutes to spare, thanks to the thinness of the traffic. Gripping the wheel in both hands, he took a deep breath, held it a moment, and expelled it with a rush. Then he tipped up the door handle and got out.
The front door opened without resistance. He shook his head. Security personnel the world over were underpaid. He hoped that whatever amount Grundage had slipped the person responsible was worth the loss of his job if it got back to his superiors.
No alarm had gone off when he pulled at the door, and when he stepped inside, the motion sensors mounted high on the walls regarded him without interest. They would have been disarmed, most likely by the same person who’d left the door unlocked. Surveillance cameras attached to the ceiling had ceased their relentless oscillation, their red lights dark.
A shudder racked his shoulders. A wax museum is an eerie enough place by daylight, but at night, with the bare minimum of lights left on to discourage intruders, this one may as well have been excavated from the dust of centuries, and he the first man to enter it, and to lay eyes upon freshly interred remnants from the age of superstition and black magic. The deserted ticket counter, the garlands of theater ropes arranged to control visitor traffic during peak periods, the racks of free brochures promoting other local tourist attractions, all took on a grim aspect when shadows skulked about the extremities. A bright banner strung high overhead across the lobby advertising the current featured exhibit in honor of the Halloween season (HIGH STAKES: THE VAMPIRE IN FILM FROM NOSFERATU THROUGH TWILIGHT) writhed like a venomous serpent in the air stirred by his entrance.
Valentino had never enjoyed being frightened, even in fun. It was one thing to be scared out of one’s wits in a crowded theater, where the experience was shared, quite another to walk home down an empty street or climb a dark flight of stairs alone and with one’s imagination filled with grisly images. He had never seen a horror movie made since the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead more than once, and after his first experience with The Exorcist, he had sworn off every chiller that followed. He’d never seen anything in the Wes Craven canon or that of any of his imitators and, based on what he’d witnessed in trailers, doubted that he was any poorer for the decision. He preferred to snuggle up with Henry Hull’s werewolf of London, Frankenstein’s Monster from Karloff through Glenn Strange, and anyone who played Count Dracula until Hammer Films got carried away and started buying its Max Factor blood by the barrel. In those earlier films the hero always won, defeating the mad scientist and winning the heart of the heroine, and the ghoul thoroughly destroyed, at least until the cameras began rolling on the sequel. But even these pleasant memories became sinister when only the sound of his own breathing and the beating of his heart were present.
He’d thought to bring along a flashlight, which became essential as he passed along the first public corridor beyond sight of the front windows and saw only pitch blackness at the end. He switched it on and poked the beam about. The faces of long-dead movie stars seemed to stir in the unsteady shaft, their expressions to change from earnest to malevolent as shadows crawled. Ghosts disturbed in the middle of the night were never friendly.
Although he hadn’t been told where to go in the building, he didn’t wander, nor did he call for guidance. For one thing, he was afraid his throat wouldn’t work, as happened in bad dreams when he tried to cry out; for another, he didn’t want to take the chance of being overheard by some strolling insomniac outside and prompting a call to the police. Too late, he thought of the unlocked door and the possibility of an officer on his rounds discovering it and going in to investigate, but no power on earth could persuade him to retrace his steps. He couldn’t afford to squander whatever courage he had left turning back around and re-entering that corridor.
It struck him odd that a law-abiding citizen should spend as much time worrying about the police as a common felon engaged in his work. Was it a kind of madness? The hoarders’ obsession that he alone could be trusted to protect something of value from destruction? Or had he spent too many thousands of hours in artificially darkened rooms watching melodramatic characters conducting themselves as no sane person would in the real world? Both explanations indicated an unsound mind.
He did not wander. He knew where the meeting place was.
The way led him past Indiana Jones and Mr. Chips, How Green Was My Valley and Star Wars. Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara fled the burning of Atlanta (with the bulbs in the electric flames switched off), Easy Riders’ Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda bent over their choppers, James Dean looked sullen, Marlene Dietrich straddled a wooden chair in black lingerie and top hat. The figures were exquisite likenesses rendered in minute and lifelike detail, un
like the bland-faced mannequins one saw in roadside attractions got up in iconic costumes to suggest the originals; here, Garbo’s silken lashes appeared poised to flutter, Bogart’s scarred lip to curl away from his often-imitated snarl, Mel Gibson’s brow to wrinkle and his head to twitch. The artisans responsible had been brought in from all over the world, and if their commissions were reflected in the admission price, they were well worth it. As a matter of fact, Valentino found $8.95 more than reasonable for an experience that would last far longer than most movies that cost ten dollars to see and took ten minutes to forget. The place was a permanent fixture in a landscape constantly in flux, like Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the two-story-tall wooden letters sprawled across the hills that had given the community its name, along with a culture and an attitude that for better or worse was known throughout the globe.
He came around Johnny Weissmuller in his loincloth wrestling a giant gorilla and descended the broad flight of steps that led to the Chamber of Horrors.
Here all the lights were on. The place was below street level and there were no windows to betray activity inside. He snapped off the flashlight and slid it into the briefcase containing the two reels of film in their cans.
“It’s alive! Alive! Alive!”
The maniacal cry echoed around the block-and-plaster walls, startling Valentino, who nearly dropped the case. Belatedly he recognized the voice of Colin Clive from the Frankenstein soundtrack. The fragment was followed a moment later by a bestial howl, then the somber voice of Maria Ouspenskaya in her Slavic gypsy accent: “Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” Then came brash Robert Armstrong: “It wasn’t the planes. It was beauty killed the beast.”
Someone knew he was there. Whoever it was had activated the sound system that piped memorable lines from classic horror movies into the chamber. Claude Rains had just begun his curtain speech about meddling in things man should leave alone when he was cut off. A flat, nasty chuckle reached the newcomer’s ears as if the man responsible was standing next to him. Pudge Pollard laughed the way he spoke.
He was aware suddenly of movement among the figures in a tableau he’d just passed, a stirring in the corner of his eye and a rustle of clothing. He turned that way, and his blood slid to his heels as Boris Karloff shrugged loose of his rotted wrappings and stepped from his sarcophagus. It was the set of the tomb from the opening scene of The Mummy, the 1932 original, and Im-ho-tep was coming to life after three thousand years just as he had in the film.
It was an illusion, caused by frayed nerves and the atmospheric lighting. The man was emerging from behind the coffin, not from inside, and he wore a contemporary sportcoat a size too large for him, presumably to conceal his gun when it was in its holster. It was in his hand, and although Valentino had never seen the man before and didn’t recognize his sunken cheeks and prison pallor, he knew the moment he spoke that he was Dickey Wirtz, Pollard’s wheezy-voiced confederate.
“Gave you the willies, huh? Same stunt I used to scare the pants off my ninety-year-old grandmother.”
Wirtz stepped down from the platform. “You’re the movie nut. You know what’s next.”
Valentino set the briefcase on the floor and stood with his arms out from his sides while the man patted him down with one hand, holding the gun pointed at him but out of easy reach. The hand went inside his slash pocket and came out with the cell phone. Wirtz saw it was turned on with the line open, frowned, and put it to his ear. “Hello?”
Valentino read on his face the moment Jason hung up. There was no mistaking that voice for the archivist’s. The sickly pale face grew dark. The hand holding the gun swept up so quickly Valentino had no time to brace himself. A white light burst in the side of his head. He stumbled, but caught his balance. Something warm and wet trickled down from his temple. The jagged gunsight had broken the skin.
“Pudge said no cops!”
The flat voice called out. In that echoing place there was no telling from which direction it came. “What?”
“He’s bugged!”
“Wired?”
“Cell.” He told him the rest.
A vile curse, without inflection. “Shoo him down here.”
Valentino turned back down the corridor without waiting to be ordered. He stiffened for another blow, but it didn’t come. Instead he heard a wheezy grunt. The small effort of stooping to pick up the briefcase would tax that damaged throat and his respiratory function. Something prodded Valentino’s kidney—Wirtz’s favorite spot for persuasion, it seemed—and he started forward with the man’s feet scraping the floor behind.
They passed the scene of Alien’s bloody birth, George Romero’s zombies, the shower scene from Psycho. Now he heard snatches of conversation, too low to follow, punctuated at unpredictable intervals by hissing pops like short bursts of steam escaping a leaky valve. After a few more yards a bored mechanical voice, vaguely female, said, “Seven-fourteen, what’s your twenty?” Another pop. Then: “Sherman and Sepulveda.” A male voice, just as mechanical.
The police band. Valentino felt a fear he had never known watching the movies that had inspired the exhibits. He hadn’t once thought the killers might have brought along a scanner. They would know the police were on their way long before rescue arrived.
He stopped. They had entered a series of tableaus devoted to the horror films of Roger Corman. Figures—he couldn’t tell how many—stood in the shadow of the wall enclosing The Masque of the Red Death. The fact that they were not on a platform told him they weren’t made of wax.
Something moved in the shadow and Pudge Pollard came out into the light, gripping a handgun similar to his partner’s. In his other hand he held the handle of a portable radio receiver, which was silent now between transmissions. Even L.A. had its quiet nights.
“Dumb move, pal,” Pollard said. “Amateur’s mistake. Who’d you call?”
He saw no advantage in lying. “A friend. We have fifteen minutes before he calls the police.”
“We’ll know when he does.” Pollard set the scanner on the edge of the platform. “Okay, Dickey. Check out the case.”
Wirtz moved back into his line of sight, stuck his gun into his underarm holster, and rummaged around inside the briefcase until he brought out one of the flat cans. He held it out to Pollard, who took it but barely glanced at it. “Okay, guy,” said the flat voice. “You know what to look for.”
The shadow shifted again and J. Arthur Greenwood came forward. Valentino froze, as motionless as Vincent Price in his scarlet robe. The aged collector looked distinctly uncomfortable among cinematic displays that did not belong to him.
22
THE RETIRED PUBLISHER of Horrorwood wore a mohair suit tailored to his burly frame and a Tyrolean hat perched at an angle whose gaiety did not extend to his expression. His black-tinted hair and pencil moustache looked even more artificial against the gray of his face. He looked nervous, and not at all as a connoisseur of fantasy memorabilia should look when he was within arm’s reach of the gem of any modern collection.
Valentino found his voice at last. “You?”
Greenwood shook his head, and went on shaking it as if he suffered from palsy. It moved like the safety plug on a pressure cooker coming to full steam.
Pollard chuckled again. “Get real, pal. He almost wet himself when we dropped in on him. He’s just here to get a look at the goods.” He extended the can to Greenwood without taking his eyes or his gun off the archivist.
“One moment, please.” The octogenarian’s head stopped shaking. He tucked his cane under one arm, drew a pair of surgical gloves from one of the flap pockets of his coat, and wriggled his fingers into them.
Wirtz snorted. “Pansy.”
Greenwood paid him no attention. His nerves appeared to have settled as he went through the familiar process of authentication. When he had the can in hand he fumbled with the seam, but got it open finally and remo
ved the reel from inside. He set the can on the floor, puffing as he straightened, unspooled two feet of film, and held it up so the overhead light shone through the frames. His breathing quickened; Valentino knew that sensation. At length he rerolled the film and nodded.
“Okay. Let’s have the other, Dickey.”
A new voice came from the shadows. “That won’t be necessary. I know a bit about these people. They’d rather forego an item than break up a set. Thank you, Mr. Greenwood.”
The collector hesitated in the midst of returning the reel to its container. “You won’t forget our agreement.”
“You’ll be the sole bidder. Just remember your part of it.”
“Of course, although it’s a shame I can’t show it off.”
“After the grand jury’s no longer in session and things settle down, you may show it to whomever you like.”
“I hope I live that long.”
“You won’t if you don’t hold up your end.”
Distractedly, Valentino watched Greenwood return the can to Pollard, who had to tug a little to free it from his hand, and walk up the corridor toward the entrance, his cane and handmade shoes tapping the floor hastily (undoubtedly it was the only time he’d moved that fast away from an acquisition). The voice in shadow was maddeningly familiar, but the archivist had met so many new people in the course of this affair he failed to place it in the crowd. Mike Grundage? No, and that astonished him. If he’d come here knowing nothing else, he’d been sure of whom he was coming to meet.
The scanner crackled. Time stood still, but it was a routine report of a minor accident. Incredibly, it seemed, only a fraction of the fifteen minutes had elapsed.
“I wish you could follow orders as well as you follow a trail,” said the voice. “Still, we’re almost finished here.” As he spoke, he came out into the light. Horace Lysander, Mike Grundage’s attorney, had dressed for the occasion, in a dark suit over a midnight-blue shirt with tie to match.
Valentino’s breath caught. Then he nodded. “It makes sense. You knew Craig Hunter had stolen the film, and that I was the only likely person he’d entrust it to for safekeeping. That’s what he called me about the night he was killed, to tell me to expect it. He knew Grundage wouldn’t touch him as long as the film was somewhere his gorillas couldn’t lay hands on it.”
Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive! Page 17