The intercom buzzed.
“I’m out, Ruth,” he said. “Tell them I’m in Tibet, looking for the abominable snowman’s wedding video.”
She left the speaker on. “I’m sorry, Miss Shasta. He’s out.”
He’d cracked her code. He jammed his thumb down on the lighted button before Ruth could hang up. “Hi, Fanta. Sorry about that. I’ve been conducting an impromptu press conference.”
“I’ll call back.”
“No!” He barked it. He apologized again. “People have been hanging up on me all day. I’m starting to feel like a telemarketer. Did you turn up any unexplained disappearances around the time Warren Pegler sold the Oracle?”
“Sure, but I did better than that. I found Pegler.”
“You’re kidding. Alive and kicking?”
“Maybe, if he had legs. But alive for sure.”
**
III
DISH
NIGHT
**
CHAPTER
14
THE PRINTOUT WAS from the Pittsburgh Dispute dated Friday, November 30, 1956:
POLICE SEEK PHILANTHROPIST’S SON
Officers with the Missing Persons detail of the Pittsburgh Police Department are searching for the estranged son of a prominent contributor to local charities after the son failed to show up at his mother’s home for a promised Thanksgiving visit Wednesday.
Albert Spinoza, 21, a former assistant projectionist at the Roxy Theater in Pittsburgh, left the home where he lived with his parents, Abraham and Eloise Spinoza, three years ago after an altercation and had not been heard from until last week, when he telephoned his mother to say he was returning for a visit, according to Mrs. Spinoza, who was honored recently with a Citizen of the Year Award for her many large donations to nonprofit foundations in the area. She told officers that the death last December of her husband, Albert’s father, had persuaded him to end their estrangement.
Mrs. Spinoza arrived at Union Station Wednesday morning to meet her son’s train, but he was not aboard. A clerk with the railroad told the Dispatch that no record exists of anyone purchasing a ticket anywhere in the United States under the name Albert Spinoza.
Lieutenant Howard Prosper of the Missing Persons detail said that foul play is not suspected at this time. However, he said that because of Mrs. Spinoza’s prominence in the community, every step is being taken to trace her son.
Valentino skimmed the sheet, then read it a second time more closely. He was seated in a blown-out upholstered armchair in the room Fanta shared with a female classmate, absent at the time. Precisely half the room was heaped with discarded clothing, stained pizza boxes, and college texts, while the other half—where Fanta sat in front of her computer—was as neat as if someone had dragged an enormous crumb scraper to the center of the floor. One bed was made, the other invisible under detritus. There was a dormitory smell of pepperoni and neglected laundry, and someone outside the open door to the hall was listening to Eminem.
“What nationality is Spinoza?” he asked.
“Dutch, I think.”
“That’s encouraging. Harriet Johansen said the victim was probably German or Dutch. The age is right.”
“If you’d told me she said that, I might have had this yesterday.”
“Forgive me; I’ve been preoccupied. How the heck did you find this?”
She smiled, all trace of resentment gone. Today she had on cutoff jeans, a denim baseball cap with her ponytail flowing out through the hole above the adjustable band, and a blue T-shirt that read LAWYERS DO IT ON THE BENCH. She was barefoot.
“I’ve got a Word Menu program on the computer. I had it keyword every job connected with a movie theater, on the hunch there was a professional link to the Oracle. I figured if it came up empty I’d just start from scratch. Projectionist hit the jackpot.”
“Did you stop there?”
“Duh. No, and I forgive you again for asking. An usher went missing in St. Paul in nineteen sixty and a candy-counter clerk did a Winona Ryder from a theater in New Jersey with the night’s receipts in fifty-four, but they found the usher drowned in the Mississippi a couple days later and arrested the clerk at a bus station. Anyway there were local connections in both cases.”
“We still can’t connect this one to the Oracle. I don’t like the fact his parents seem to have been well-to-do. Harriet said whoever drilled and filled Mr. Bones’s teeth did it on the cheap.”
“So it’s Harriet now.” She grinned.
He sighed. “Yes, Fanta, it’s Harriet. I’m carrying her love child.”
“Whoa!”
He apologized yet again. He seemed to have developed a habit of it with her. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“I thought you looked bummed. Spinoza ran away, don’t forget. Even if they wanted to give him his allowance, they wouldn’t have known where to send it. Maybe he couldn’t stay away from the Milk Duds in the lobby and went to a quack.” She pointed at the printout. “The Dispatch ran a follow-up a week later, when the cops called off the search: no leads. I can make you a hard copy of that too, but it was mostly rehash.”
He shook his head. “This would explain why there was nothing in the L.A. papers. If the Pittsburgh police made inquiries there, it wouldn’t have been considered news. I doubt Spinoza’s own hometown sheet would’ve covered it if his mother weren’t a local hero.”
“If there was an inquiry, wouldn’t it be on file with the LAPD?”
“The big-city departments were just introducing computers then; dinosaurs with cooling units that filled rooms. If they bothered to transfer it to the memory bank back then, they wouldn’t waste space on their current hard drive with an obsolete file on a routine request from clear across the country.”
“Then Sergeant Clifford won’t have this.”
“Not unless she did what you did.” He flicked the printout with his hand. “As good citizens, we’re obliged to report this.”
“Morally, yeah. Legally—”
“—it isn’t evidence. That was your argument last time, and look at all the trouble it caused. The sooner she has this information, the sooner the case gets wrapped up and we get to keep Greed.”
“Unless it’s a wild goose chase, and she wastes a lot of time the film doesn’t have running it out.” She turned her chair, a vinyl swivel patched all over with duct tape, tore a sheet off a pad on the computer station, and turned back. “This is where we’ll find Warren Pegler. We can ask him about Spinoza and save the cops some shoe leather.”
He read the hastily penciled note, recognizing the name of the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills. As a former studio technician during the Golden Age, Pegler would qualify for residency. “You just typed in his name and out came his address?”
“If it were that easy, you would have had this yesterday. But the older you get, the wider the paper trail.”
“He must be a hundred.”
“Ninety-eight. I pulled up his birth record. He’s a native, born in San Diego under Teddy Roosevelt. Married and widowed, no children. I found that feature piece you mentioned from when he bought the Oracle, but no documents or ink to back up the claim he lost both legs in an accident at MGM.”
“Hospitals move, their records get lost or go into the incinerator when they collect enough dust. Since the studio settled out of court, it probably kept the story from the papers at the time. After the Taylor and Arbuckle scandals, the last thing the industry needed was another, and back then it had the clout to silence the local press.”
“I was with you right up until Taylor and Arbuckle.”
“Not important. They were too hot to handle in nineteen twenty-two, but now they’re as cold as Albert Spinoza, if that’s him down at the morgue.” He took out his cell and punched buttons. “I’ve got a friend in Admissions at the Country Home. She can tell me if Pegler’s in shape to receive visitors.”
“You memorized the number?”
“Most of my sources h
ave lived there for years. One or two more trips and I can claim it as my voting address.” A receptionist answered. “Kym Trujillo, please,” he said.
“Valentino!” This was a husky female voice, lightly touched by a Hispanic accent. “You ready to check in? You could hold your own in the conversation in the cafeteria.”
“Ask me again next year. I’d like to arrange a visit with one of your residents. Warren Pegler.”
“I know Warren. I admitted him myself. He’s a quiet sort, very popular with this crowd. Hang on.”
He waited three minutes. A picture of the late U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and a James Dean poster hung on Fanta’s side of the room, opposite a painting of a bloated dead horse on her roommate’s.
Kym came back on, sounding subdued. “I talked to one of his nurses. He’s an Alzheimer’s case, has his good days and his bad. Today’s not so good. He’s usually at his best in the morning.”
He thanked her and said he’d call back then.
“I overheard,” Fanta said. “How many girlfriends do you have?”
He decided not to get mad. “She’s too valuable a contact to risk getting personal with.” He folded the printout, put it in a pocket, and patted it. “A possible victim and a possible witness—or suspect,” he said. “Two for one. Dish night.”
“What’s that?”
“During the Depression, theaters gave away a free piece of china with each ticket, one night a week. The idea was to keep customers coming back to collect the set.”
She shook her head. “I’ll never take it all in. This is worse than studying for the bar.”
“You’re doing fine.” He struggled out of the quagmire of his chair. “That was excellent work. You’ll make a great lawyer.”
“That sounds like the dump speech. I’m going with you tomorrow, aren’t I?”
“How many classes did you miss while you were sitting at that computer?”
“When I want to be hassled I’ll call my father. I’m the one who found Pegler.”
“If you went up there with me, all you’d be doing is reading magazines in the visitors’ room. I earn my salary talking to these people. They’re old and frail, their memories come and go, they know their weaknesses and they intimidate easily. Whatever Pegler’s part in this is, he might think he’s being ganged up on by two strangers. If he panics or clams up, we’ll have made the trip for nothing.”
She slumped forward, resting her wrists on her bare muscular thighs. “My nana was in a nursing home, with dementia. She got violent sometimes, and she was the sweetest old gal you ever met.”
“She was the script girl?”
She nodded, staring at the floor,
“It isn’t the dump speech,” he said. “If anything comes of this, I promise you’ll be the first one I call.”
“Hey!” She sat up. “What about getting to see the show?”
“The show?”
“Hello?”
He was tireder than he’d thought. “I’ve only seen the first reel myself. It might be on safety by now. Dr. Broadhead will have to screen it anyway, to make sure it came out all right. You might have to watch it in negative,” he said. “At the pace they’re going, they can’t stop to strike off a positive print.”
“Insider stuff. Cool.” She put on flip-flops.
He called Broadhead’s line. Ruth answered. “Hang on, he just got off the phone. That Yolanda woman tried to reach you.”
It took him a second to make that leap. “Johansen. She’s a forensic scientist, not a stripper. Did she leave a message?”
“Something about owing you a tour. I’m putting you through now.”
Broadhead listened to Valentino, then said, “Reel one came out of the soup this morning. It needs to dry twenty-four hours. I can run the original, if you don’t mind sitting through it again. I assume you want to be present for the unveiling.”
“You assume right.”
“You two still playing Nick and Nora?”
“I’ll tell you about it when I see you.” He flipped the phone shut, yawning bitterly.
“Why don’t I borrow my roommate’s car and drive myself?” Fanta asked. “You should go home and crash.”
“Not on your life. Turns out you’re going to see it on the original silver nitrate. I want to witness the reaction. Anyway, if I went home I’d just lie there trying to stay awake.” He told her about von Stroheim’s ghost. He’d been stonewalling so much lately it felt good to trust someone with an embarrassing confession.
“Cool,” she said when he finished. “Ectoplasm.”
“Dementia. Maybe when I’m at the Country Home I should pick out a room.”
“I agree with Dr. Broadhead. Maybe you’re not hallucinating.”
“You’ve been watching too many Wes Craven movies.”
“It’s a haunted town, I’ve known that my whole life. We’ve got dead people’s footprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese, streets named after dead directors, dead stars in the homes on the maps to the stars’ homes. My folks took me to the Alamo once on vacation. When I walked in, I felt the same thing I feel when I walk on Sunset, only there it’s Davy Crockett and here it’s Steve McQueen.”
“Most people don’t get advice from Davy Crockett and Steve McQueen. Why should I be singled out?”
“Let’s look at it from the spook’s point of view. The old bugger was pretty bummed out about what happened to Greed, right?”
“‘No matter if I could talk to you three weeks steadily could I possibly describe even to a small degree the heartache I suffered through the mutilation of my sincere work.’ He said that to his biographer. I memorized it.”
She nodded. “I think that’s why he singled you out.”
**
CHAPTER
15
“WELL, IF IT ain’t the Great Lover.”
Valentino frowned at the attendant in the campus garage. “That was John Gilbert.”
“I bet he never forgot his pass.”
“Parking fuzz,” said Fanta as they drove past the raised gate. “Probably came out here looking for a part on Hill Street Blues.”
“Dragnet, more likely. I’ve looked high and low for that damn pass.”
“Maybe von Stroheim took it.”
On the landing outside the hall to his office, Fanta laced an arm through one of his. “Let’s give Ruth a case of the fantods.”
His judgment was too foggy to protest. As they strolled through the door arm in arm, Harriet Johansen turned their way from the desk.
She wore a light summer dress that clung to her in all the best places. The orange spark in her eye when she saw him and the young woman quickened his heart and stopped it at the same time. Behind the desk, Ruth took in the scene with an expression distilled from satisfaction and disgust.
Instinctively the newcomers parted. Valentino stepped forward. “Harriet, you remember Fanta.”
“It’s a little different meeting you outside a crime scene.” The CSI’s voice was toneless.
“Hi. I wouldn’t have recognized you without your smock.”
“I wasn’t expecting you,” Valentino said.
Ruth snorted and rattled her keyboard.
“I came to take you up on that movie invitation,” Harriet said. “Afterward I thought I’d walk you through the lab downtown.”
“Your timing’s perfect. Dr. Broadhead and I were about to screen Greed for Fanta. That’s the major project you saw us working on yesterday.” He was talking fast.
“Another time.” Harriet looked at her watch. “I just remembered I’m supposed to assist with an autopsy.” She went toward the stairs, heels snapping on the linoleum.
“Can I call you downtown later?”
The door swung shut behind her.
Kyle Broadhead came out of his office. “I thought I heard voices. Let’s get moving. We’ve only got the inner screening room till five.” He stopped in mid-stride, looked from one face to the other. “Who died?�
�
“Some dude on an autopsy table,” Fanta said.
**
Valentino’s message light was blinking when he got back to his apartment. He and Harriet had exchanged home numbers. He pounced on it, but the message was from Ruth, reporting that a Mr. Khruschev had called the office to say he’d be a half hour late for their appointment at The Oracle. That would be Leo Kalishnikov, the theater designer. Valentino tried calling Harriet and gave up after eight rings.
The situation called for anxiety or rueful amusement, but by then he was too exhausted to feel anything but numb. He’d actually fallen asleep during Greed, and had missed experiencing that first reel all over again through Fanta’s eyes. Her own expressed reaction, after Broadhead shook him awake, had seemed subdued. She hadn’t been able to stop apologizing for the prank that had blown up in their faces.
But he was too far gone for mulling over the events of another roller-coaster day, and fell asleep seconds after slipping into bed. Von Stroheim, that master of irony and pity, chose not to disturb him.
He awoke refreshed, took a sip of instant coffee, and tried Harriet again. This time a machine answered; either she was screening her calls or had left early for work. He left a stumbling message of apology and explanation and asked her to call back. Next he got Kym Trujillo on the line.
“Warren’s having a great day,” she said. “He’s on his way with an attendant to visit his wife’s plot in Westwood Village Memorial. He always comes back in a chipper mood.”
“It doesn’t depress him?”
“I guess when you’re pushing the century mark, you take your friends and loved ones as you find them. He’ll be back before you get here. Knowing he has a visitor coming will set the stage nicely.”
He put himself together, resisted an impulse to call Harriet again, and left. The drive from Century City to Woodland Hills was brief in miles, but he caught every red light several times in lockstep traffic. Motorists blew their horns, observing the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of rush hour.
The Motion Picture Country Home is airy and spacious and beautifully maintained with funds from the actors and writers guilds and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Kym was nowhere in sight, but a chubby young man in the office smiled up at him from behind a desk with a single sheet of paper on its glass top. A trivet read ASSISTANT ACTIVITIES DIRECTOR. Valentino figured the position turned over too often to bother personalizing the sign.
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