Scratch on the Dark (A Mike Faraday Mystery Book 4)

by Copper, Basil

  ‘Who is this speaking?’ The voice on the phone was guttural, dark-toned.

  ‘Faraday,’ I said. ‘You suffer from insomnia too?’ He ignored the irony.

  ‘Hud Gibson here. Perhaps you heard of me?’

  I searched around in my head. Then I placed him. He was a sculptor and photographer of some reputation. I didn’t like his habits or reputation. An obese, greasy slob of a man who spent most of his nights chasing blondes when he wasn’t propping up some downtown bar.

  Though I didn’t tell him that.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘The bedstead welder. How’s the scrap business these days?’

  He chuckled. He sounded like he was hard to offend.

  ‘Fair,’ he said. ‘Fair. I got another exhibition coming off in San Francisco in the fall.’

  ‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘But I take it you didn’t ring me up this time of the morning just to sell me a catalogue?’

  He laughed again.

  ‘Good, Faraday, good,’ he said. ‘A distinct wit. You got a minute? Anybody there?’

  I looked around the bedroom, ‘Not unless they came in during the night without my permission,’ I said. ‘I have to beat the frails back these days, I’m so attractive to women.’

  He sniggered. ‘That’s my problem, too.’ Then he became serious. ‘Listen, Faraday, I hear you’re engaged in the Zarah Fayne case.’

  ‘There is no Zarah Fayne case, as you put it,’ I said. ‘How did you know, anyway?’

  He grunted. ‘Word gets around town. I got something that might be useful. Can’t talk any more over the phone. Can you come out to my place this afternoon?’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I promised. I took down his address and rang off. Then I rolled over and lit myself a cigarette. I looked up at the ceiling and wondered what a sculptor might have to do with the Zarah Fayne set-up. This might be interesting. I finished the cigarette and then got up and took a hot shower. Afterwards, I dressed and fried myself some eggs in the small kitchen of the house. Before I left for the office I went upstairs to my locked cupboard where I kept my small armoury of weapons. I broke out the Smith-Wesson and put it in the webbing holster under my arm. Way things were going it might be dangerous around town before long.

  *

  I sat in my office and frowned at my coffee cup. The grounds in the bottom of the cup grinned back up at me. The wind shifted and rattled at the window. The cars went by on the boulevard, their windscreen wipers going monotonously in the thin, cold rain. The central heating creaked in the intervals between Stella’s measured bursts on her typewriter.

  ‘Item,’ I said. Stella stopped her typing and shifted her chair up towards me. Her blonde hair was a shimmering mass in the light of the overhead lamp. She got out her scratch pad and put it on the blotter beside her. Her smile had a sardonic quality to it.

  ‘Item,’ I said again. ‘Zarah Fayne is missing. She’s been seen around the last month but is at the moment untraceable. Item; the suspected boyfriend, Chuck Esterbrook, whom I’m about to interview is blasted on set. Convenient.’

  ‘Too convenient,’ said Stella.

  ‘Item,’ I went on, ‘a gent with blond hair, a tough build and a grey hounds-tooth jacket was around the gun-counter in the prop department when the irons were dished out. The same man, incidentally, who ransacked Esterbrook’s house just before I arrived.

  Not to mention his nasty habit of spitting on my door panel. Just before I arrived at the studio.’

  ‘Where he’d probably finished his work on the guns,’ said Stella.

  I went on. ‘Item; one Hud Gibson, a sculptor and arty photographer turns up when my current leads have disappeared. He knows something about the Zarah Fayne ‘case’.’

  I tapped my teeth with the pencil I’d just jotted the salient points down with. I got out my pack of cigarettes. Stella lit up for me almost before I’d had time to put the cigarette in my mouth. I leaned back in the chair and let the smoke trickle through my nostrils.

  ‘So where does it get us?’ said Stella.

  ‘Just nowhere,’ I said. ‘Leastways until I sort Gibson out. But it doesn’t look good for Zarah Fayne.’

  ‘You think something has happened to her?’ Stella went on.

  ‘Could well be,’ I said. ‘The man in the grey jacket was playing for keeps. And if Esterbrook knew something about Dr Crisp’s fifty thousand then Zarah Fayne may well be out of the way. Right out of the way.’

  ‘Except that she’s been seen around,’ said Stella, looking at me levelly with those candid eyes of hers.

  ‘Don’t complicate things,’ I said. ‘People don’t always tell me the truth in this business.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting that the housekeeper, her agent, the man at Caribou Lake are all in some plot to head you off?’ said Stella mildly.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘But there’s a big piece missing somewhere. And it’s the piece held by Zarah Fayne.’

  ‘The oracle,’ said Stella reprovingly.

  ‘I may not always be right but I’m never wrong,’ I said.

  She chuckled. She shut her notebook with a snap and went back over to her typewriter.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said darkly.

  She attacked her typewriter almost viciously. I settled back to finish my cigarette.

  *

  Rowell Street was in one of the less smart areas of L.A., in a rundown quarter of lock-up shops and liquor stores. It was around dusk when I arrived there and the thin rain had lifted. I sat in the Buick with the engine quietly running and surveyed the situation. 2146 seemed to be an apartment over one of the shops, as far as I could make out. There were sets of cement steps fenced in with iron railings at the end of the blocks. I pulled in behind a TV company’s delivery truck and killed the motor.

  I got out the car, locked the driving door and glanced around the street. There were lights in most of the shops, and the food stores and supermarkets were crowded with customers, predominantly negroes. Two big cops went by, their capes glistening from the rain. They went along the sidewalk, stopping now and then to examine the licence stickers on the windscreens. I went on across the forecourt in front of an arcade of shops, checking on the street numbers. I got up the side staircase and found myself out on a paved terrace.

  The apartment I wanted had clipped hedges set in boxes around the forecourt and something that looked like a bicycle frame; it seemed like it had been smashed to pieces with a sledgehammer and then welded together again. The handlebars looked like menacing antlers in the dusk. I grinned. This was the place all right. I went on over to a circular door set back in a carved oak lintel; a chiselled wooden hand stuck out from the door like a dead man’s welcome in the place where the handle would normally have been.

  There was a gilded bust of a woman on one side of the door, which looked like a ship’s figurehead; there was a light burning over the door in a drawn representation of what looked like a human eye and by its light I could see there was a brass push set into the figurehead’s right hand nipple. I pushed it and waited. I wondered what would have happened if I had pushed the left hand one. I didn’t get a chance to find out.

  ‘Come on in, Faraday,’ Gibson’s voice boomed from a concealed speaker. I gave the door a hearty handshake and went on into Ali Baba’s cave.

  The furniture in the hall was bright scarlet, the floor orange; the doors and their frames were made out of anodized metal. On the walls were paintings in vivid colours that made me think someone’s intestines had been spilled in a traffic accident. I guess it made a change from Monarch of the Glen. I walked gingerly round furniture made from hammered sheet iron and on down the hallway. Dissonant music spilled from concealed speakers; the stuff was so jagged it made Bartok sound like Johann Strauss. The Elder at that.

  At the end of the hall the floor broadened out into a wide platform; the lime-green walls were decorated with photographs mounted on expensive handmade paper and water-colour portraits in gilt frames. I recogni
zed both sets of pictures as being the work of Gibson. They were outstanding. There were a number of pastels on the wall too; some of them were pretty good. There were others that weren’t so hot. I recognized Lillian Gish, King Vidor, Dick Barthelmess, the elder Fairbanks. These were the good ones; he’d caught the expressions well. I didn’t know about the minor actors, the near-bums and whisky-soaked matinee idols. But where the subjects were great the pictures were good.

  Hud Gibson was a hulking slob of a man, with a two day’s growth of stubble on his face and a bright red fringe of hair which stood up like a halo round the bald patch on the top of his head. Right now, he sat in a black leather armchair whose legs looked like they’d been tortured before they died; his grey, button-up pullover was stained and discoloured with slobber and spilled food. His midriff stuck out like a motor tyre; he wore scarlet velvet sneakers and bright green jeans with a blue military stripe down the side of them.

  He lolled back in the chair and toyed with a goblet containing amber liquid which had crushed ice in it; he had his eyes half-closed and held the goblet close up under his nostrils like it was nectar or something. The ice tinkled softly in the glass as he swilled the liquid around. Except for a few chairs and a table or two the room in which he sat was almost empty; behind him was something that looked like an automobile wreck. Roughly welded metal stuck out at all angles; copper tubes broke up the monotony of the grey-silver alloy from which the majority of the thing was made. Gibson had been a talented photographer and painter before he turned to this. I lowered myself into another leather chair opposite Gibson without being invited. He didn’t open his eyes or stop swilling his drink.

  ‘Glad you could come, Faraday,’ he said in that guttural voice. ‘What you think of my latest happening?’

  He was referring to the car-wreck behind him.

  ‘Looks like a heap of junk to me,’ I said cautiously.

  ‘Isn’t it though?’ he said enthusiastically. ‘But they’re going crazy over the stuff in San Francisco. It’s going to be a money-spinner, boy.’

  He opened his eyes wide for the first time then. I had a shock. They were beautiful eyes. Almost like a woman’s; the lashes were long and the pupils themselves a deep, icy-blue that seemed to bore right through you. I could imagine they were eyes that a woman would go for. Curiously enough, they weren’t at all blood-shot. He smiled a fat-lipped smile and a thin dribble of saliva ran down from the corner of his mouth on to his pullover. He didn’t bother to wipe it off.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said.

  I saw then that there was a glass on the table at my elbow. It smelt like whisky and ice gleamed coolly in it. I sipped it appreciatively. It tasted like whisky too.

  ‘What’s your problem, Gibson?’ I said.

  He screwed up his eyes again and swirled the amber liquid. He got up before answering and went to a black mica panel set into the front of a table like a console. He flicked a switch and the St Vitus music died away.

  ‘Now we can talk,’ he mumbled. He went and sat down and picked up his glass. I looked over his shoulder to a pen and ink sketch of a young girl; I should say it was one of the best things he had ever done, probably while he was still in his teens. His face changed as he caught my glance; he knew I was looking at the picture. His eyes expressed satisfaction.

  ‘A poor thing, but mine own,’ he said.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said. ‘Art never was my speciality.’

  He refilled his glass and took a sip, rinsing the whisky around his tongue.

  ‘I figure everyone ought to leave his scratch on the dark before he goes out,’ he said. ‘No matter what their talent. Otherwise, it’s like we’d never been.’

  He had a point there. But I hadn’t come to discuss metaphysics.

  ‘You know something about Zarah Fayne?’ I said.

  His eyes narrowed and he shifted in his chair.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said easily. ‘That’s why you came over, remember?’

  ‘I remember,’ I said. ‘Question is, do you?’

  He smiled. ‘I might — for a consideration.’

  ‘I’m not that interested,’ I said.

  He smiled again. ‘I heard around town that you were. Considerably interested.’

  I waited for him to go on.

  ‘One or two people in Hollywood would like to know Zarah Fayne’s whereabouts,’ he said after a pause. He put down the glass on the sheet metal table at his side and studied dirty finger nails with a frown.

  ‘This type of sculpture ruins one’s hands,’ he said wistfully.

  ‘How much is the information worth?’ he went on.

  ‘Difficult to say until I’ve seen it,’ I said. ‘Besides, sweeteners come too high on what I make on an inquiry like this.’

  He brushed the remark aside irritably. ‘Not you,’ he said. ‘Dr Crisp might.’

  ‘He might,’ I agreed outwardly, reaching for my glass. Inwardly, I was laughing as loud as Jasmine over at Crisp’s Santa Monica house at the suggestion. Evidently Crisp and the Fayne woman had most people fooled.

  ‘Then you’d be wrong,’ Gibson snapped.

  He bellowed with laughter.

  ‘He don’t give a tinker’s cuss where she goes or what she does.’

  ‘Then what are we discussing?’ I asked.

  ‘Jus’ trying you on, Faraday,’ he said good-naturedly. Another rivulet of saliva coursed down his flabby jowls. ‘You don’t give much away either. Only I know the setup. And I don’t happen to be in need of loose change at the moment.’

  ‘Then what did you cut yourself in for — philanthropy?’ I asked. I put back my glass on the table.

  ‘No need to get personal, Faraday,’ he said aggrievedly. ‘Okay then. Joke over.’

  He waved a finger like a cigar stub in my direction. ‘Get this. The Fayne woman was in the porn film racket up to her beautiful eyebrows. She and her chums made some beautiful stuff. You know the average muck they knock off after hours around the studios? Well, this was real art compared with that. The films cost hundreds of bucks a throw. The Fayne woman got a big cut on every print sold. And they’ve been flooding the nation with them over the last ten years.’

  I leaned forward and lit a cigarette. I offered him one. He waved it away.

  ‘How come you know all this?’ I said.

  ‘Because I did the photography on a lot of them,’ he said with a smirk. I resisted an impulse to throw my glass in his face. He was one of the most nauseating characters ever turned up from under a stone.

  ‘Quality stuff,’ he said. ‘And we had the best distributing agents in the business.’

  ‘So why did you quit?’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘Things were getting too hot. I didn’t like the way the set-up was being run. And there were too many people in the know. The Fayne woman was a nympho. She wanted everyone on the set in the act. It began to look like the Babylonian sequence in Intolerance. Only for real.’

  ‘Grapes and all,’ I said.

  ‘Grapes and all,’ he repeated seriously. He got up suddenly.

  ‘You need another drink, Mr Faraday,’ he said.

  ‘I still don’t figure your motive in telling me all this,’ I said.

  He turned round from mixing the ice in my drink. His plump shoulders were bowed diffidently like a man controlling his patience with difficulty.

  ‘The Fayne woman,’ he said harshly. ‘Big trouble. I could see it blowing up.’

  ‘So?’ I said.

  ‘I think she’s gone a long ways off,’ he said.

  There was a heavy silence in the room.

  ‘Murdered?’ I said.

  He spread his fat arms wide. ‘What else?’

  He came over and put the drink in my hand. He went and sat down heavily opposite me.

  ‘I’ve guessed the reason you asked me here,’ I said.

  He looked at me long and levelly with those strange blue eyes. ‘I’d be glad to know she is dead,’ he said. ‘It would be a weight of
f my mind.’

  He swept his hand round in a gesture which embraced the contents of the room.

  ‘If the blue film racket blew up it would blow me up with it. Just when I’m really starting to add up to something in modern art.’

  ‘So if you wanted her out of the way there might be a lot of others in the same position?’ I said.

  He smiled again. ‘You catch on quickly, Faraday,’ he said.

  *

  The room was thick with smoke. I had to refuse a third glass of whisky. I looked at my watch. I’d been sitting there for over two hours. It had been an interesting conversation. I’d learned a lot about the underground cinema industry but not much about Zarah Fayne’s whereabouts.

  ‘So why would a well-known actress like Zarah Fayne risk being seen on thousands of home movie screens?’ I said.

  He snorted contemptuously. ‘Use your marbles, Faraday. She wore a blonde wig, dark glasses, any one of a hundred disguises. There’s ways of using make-up too …’

  ‘Don’t go on,’ I said. ‘I get the drift.’

  ‘What about the others in the racket?’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘No deal there. I want to sleep nights.’

  ‘All right, Gibson,’ I said. ‘What’s your proposition?’

  He uncrossed his legs ponderously.

  ‘I got some clips of film you’d find interesting. I might just pass them over. This was a private one I shot. You can recognize Zarah. And the man with her might give you a lead. But you don’t know from here to hell where the film came from. Otherwise no deal. Right?’

  I finished off my cigarette and ground it out on the stomach of an ashtray shaped like a nude woman. ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘You want money for the print, I take it?’

  He shook his head. ‘We already went through that,’ he said wearily.

  ‘Well, if you got the film I’ll be on my way,’ I said.

  He snorted again. ‘Faraday,’ he said in a pained voice like he was deeply shocked. ‘Use a little imagination. You don’t think I keep it here, do you? Stuff like that? Use your brains. I’ll go pick it up and we’ll meet tomorrow.’