Frames

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Warren’s expecting you,” the young man said. “They only wrote down your last name. Is your first Eric, by any chance?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry. His condition comes and goes. When he’s not entirely, er, lucid, he keeps asking for someone named Eric. I thought it might be a family member. He seldom has visitors, so I assumed—” He shrugged. “Are you a relative?”

  He gave the young man a card and the story he’d had ready. “I’m a film archivist. I understand Mr. Pegler worked in the developing lab at MGM in the twenties. I wanted to ask him some questions about early Hollywood.” He was pretty sure “about a murder” would not result in an interview.

  “It says on your card you’re a detective.”

  “Show business pizzazz. Historian doesn’t pop in this town.” He made a mental note to have more pragmatic cards printed for certain venues.

  “Maybe you’re being too modest. You’ve told me more about his professional background than he’s ever told any of us, except when he’s regressing, and that’s usually a jumble. His file’s lean on detail, but from the dates and some things he’s said, it appears he was in the industry long before it was an industry. Room eighteen.”

  In a sunny hallway he passed a fleet of walkers and wheelchairs and the more ambulatory elderly guiding themselves along a wall rail. Some he’d met before greeted him, others he’d met before stared through him without recognition. He identified still others whose celebrity had faded ahead of them. There was more star power under that roof than anywhere else in Tinseltown, but there were no fans or paparazzi on the grounds.

  Well, there was one fan; but for once he wasn’t there to ask about gossip on the set.

  A loud domestic argument seemed to be going on behind the door to eighteen. Pausing with knuckles raised inches from the panel, he heard a hysterical contralto and an infuriated baritone. Then he recognized Katharine Hepburn’s Old New England accent and Humphrey Bogart’s raspy lisp, and knocked loudly to make himself heard above the TV. The volume dropped and a third voice, calm as morning, told him to come in.

  The old man in the wheelchair next to the bed had a full head of white hair and lively eyes in a thin, pale, pleated face. He wore a crisp dress shirt buttoned to the neck and loose tailored slacks, their legs cut off and stitched neatly at the knees, below which was nothing. A hand came up from the arm of the chair and squeezed the trigger on a long black object.

  Valentino flinched; then the TV went silent, muted by the remote control in the old man’s hand. On the thirty-six-inch screen, Bogie and Kate tootled without sound downriver aboard the African Queen.

  “I don’t know you.”

  “No, sir, we haven’t met.”

  Warren Pegler lowered the remote. “I like to check. First my legs went, now it’s my brain. One of these days they’ll meet in the middle and I’ll just up and disappear.”

  “My name is Valentino.”

  “No, it isn’t. I’m not that far gone. He died way back when I was in physical therapy.”

  “Not that Valentino. I just bought the Oracle theater. I wanted to ask you some things about it as a former owner.”

  “You bought yourself a money hole, how’s that for starters? Cost you less just to hang a ‘Rob Me’ sign around your neck.”

  “It needs fixing up.”

  “I’m not talking about repairs. They’re like allergies: They never go away, so you deal with them. Even fire can’t break you, if you’re young. It’s people. Customers, distributors, building inspectors, even my own employees took everything that wasn’t bolted down. My business manager skedaddled into Nazi Germany with all my investments. Stole from a cripple. I finally let the old trap go in fifty-six for less than I owed in back taxes. I thought they’d’ve ‘dozed it by now.”

  “I can see why it upset you,” Valentino said; although the man’s bitterness showed only in his words. His tone and demeanor remained even. “Up until then, all your financial ventures were successful.”

  “I don’t mean that. You can always recover from a bad deal. I lost my legs at eighteen and managed to get back on my feet, so to speak.” He patted a stump. Then he gestured with the remote toward a picture in a silver frame on his nightstand. A big-boned unsmiling woman stared out with her hair in a French braid. “They took Gerda, too, in the end. That was the last straw. She was a strong woman; she made most of those repairs I mentioned, the ones I couldn’t do with just my hands to work with. But she couldn’t fix her broken heart. She just shriveled away after we lost the place.”

  Valentino wondered if this was what Kym Trujillo considered chipper. Yet the old man still showed no emotion.

  “Why didn’t you sell Greed? Plenty of collectors would have paid plenty for it even then.” He watched closely for Pegler’s reaction.

  He was disappointed. The pale, pleated face was blank. “Sell greed? Times have sure changed if you can do that. Folks are generally born with it.”

  “I’ll get to the point, Mr. Pegler.” He drew up a chair that plainly had never been sat on. “A man’s skeleton was found in the basement of the Oracle, along with some reels of old film. Do you know anything about it?”

  “The basement? I kept all the pictures I rented in the projection room.”

  “Some reels showed up there as well, behind the plaster partition.”

  “I had Gerda put up that plaster to save on the heating bill. We didn’t leave anything behind it but some empty cans.”

  “You overlooked some. The rest surfaced, along with the skeleton, when a wall collapsed in the basement. It was where Max Fink hid his private liquor stock during Prohibition.”

  “Fooling around with an old man’s mind is a low thing to do, son. Especially when half of it’s gone. The basement was just a basement. If there was any liquor in it I’d have drunk it up when the jackals came.”

  “But there wasn’t any—”

  The remote pointed at him again; and if it were a gun he’d be ducking. “You’re asking me to take a lot at face value. If you’re who you say you are, if you own the Oracle, if there’s a skeleton and a film in a hidey-hole in the basement, that wall was there when I bought the place. You’ll have to ask Max Fink. You’ll find him in Forest Lawn under six feet of California.”

  “The brickwork in the entrance was relatively new. Anyway nowhere near as old as the building. And the skeleton—”

  “A lot of people have been in and out of there since me. Maybe there were two rooms in that basement and maybe there weren’t; I can’t trust my memory any more than you can, but I’m not so senile I’d forget a little thing like a skeleton. Talk to the real estate people, or the movie junkies that rented the place from them, or the hippies that moved in after they left. What are you, a cop?”

  Here was anger, cold as sharpened steel. Valentino sat back.

  “No. I work for the UCLA Film Preservation Department. The Oracle is a personal extravagance. Naturally I’m curious about the things that came with it, but I’m more interested in you professionally. I understand you were a film technician at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.”

  Pegler rested the remote on the arm of his chair. The muscles in his face relaxed. His visitor suspected this sudden shift was a symptom of his disease. “Don’t make it sound so grand,” the old man said. “I was a developer, and someone’s assistant at that. Young squirt that I was, I planned to run the studio one day, take Thalberg’s place. Do you know Mr. Thalberg?”

  The change in tenses disturbed him a little. Maybe this was one of those regressions the chubby young man in the office had mentioned. “I know of him.”

  “Well, ambition’s one thing, luck’s something else. I had too much of one and not enough of the other. Some damn fool who had no business being in the lab went out and left a cigarette burning next to fresh film stock. When the flames hit the chemicals on the shelves, the darkroom went up and me with it. They had to cut me in half to save what didn’t burn.” He touched the stump again, rubbed it
absently.

  “I’m sorry,” Valentino said.

  The old man looked down and saw what he was doing. For an instant he seemed to be wondering what had happened to the rest of the leg. Then he returned to the moment.

  “Not necessary. I was going to direct, then produce, then buy the studio. Instead I bought a theater. Folks needed a place to go to forget when times got hard. It was a good living right up till I got robbed. Poor Gerda.”

  “Who’s Eric?”

  “Eric?”

  “Someone told me you ask for him sometimes.”

  The confusion passed. On an old face it resembled fear. “These kids around me cackle like hens. I get my years mixed up from time to time. Eric was my first dog. Smartest Great Dane you ever saw. Hell, he’s dead ninety years. Coal wagon ran over him.”

  “I thought it might have been Erich von Stroheim. You both worked at Metro about the same time.”

  “That fraud. I’d hear him snarling at my boss outside the darkroom, coming on like the Kaiser. You couldn’t print a frame fast enough to bring a smile to that fish face. Said he once belonged to Franz Josef’s Imperial Guard. I bet he shoveled out the stable.”

  “He was a great director, though.”

  “DeMille was greater. He knew how to work inside a budget, and he didn’t put on airs. Von Stroheim, my aunt’s fanny. Von old hack.”

  Valentino couldn’t resist. “Any DeMille stories?”

  “You know that old chestnut that ends, ‘Ready when you are, C. B.’?”

  “Everyone must know that one by now.”

  “Never happened.”

  “Never?”

  “No one on the lot ever called him C. B. Especially not a lowly second-unit cameraman. It was always Mr. DeMille. That’s what makes a great director.”

  Valentino thanked him and rose. He stopped at the door. “Did you ever know a young man named Albert Spinoza? He was a projectionist.”

  Pegler was quiet for a moment. Then the old chin wobbled, a pathetic sight. “I’m sorry, mister, I wasn’t listening. Did you say you were from Mr. Thalberg?”

  He let himself out. Bogart and Hepburn resumed squabbling the moment he drew the door shut.

  At the end of the hall he met Kym Trujillo carrying an armload of file folders. She was a pretty, sharp-featured brunette of thirty who had turned down a modeling job for Sports Illustrated to study for her MBA. L.A. Magazine had included her in a recent spread on Latinas who made a difference.

  “How was your visit?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t tell when he was forgetting and when he was pretending.”

  “That’s how you know it’s one of his good days.”

  **

  CHAPTER

  16

  WAITING IN FRONT of The Oracle for his appointment to arrive, Valentino felt his heart sink when a white stretch Mercedes limo squashed to a stop at the curb and a chauffeur got out to open the door for a small man in a three-thousand-dollar suit. The license plate read FLIX.

  “Mr. Kalishnikov?” He shook a hand in a white doeskin glove. The little man wore a white fedora and a white cashmere coat over his shoulders like a cape. The temperature was eighty-six degrees in the shade, but the newcomer wasn’t perspiring. Valentino was sure he couldn’t afford to hire a man who didn’t sweat.

  “Mr. Valentino. Ha! A dead movie star and an obsolete assault weapon. Kismet! Pick me up in an hour, Rupert.”

  The chauffeur got in and drove away. Leo Kalishnikov surveyed the busload of chanting Berkeley students circling the sidewalk. He had eyes the color of chocolate syrup and a tiny black moustache like a lowercase w in the middle of his round face. He was younger than expected, or else a man addicted to nips and tucks. “Who is this rabble?”

  “Protesters. I can’t get them to believe that skeleton didn’t come over on the land bridge from Siberia twenty thousand years ago.”

  The little man charged up to a hulking student with hair to his shoulders and put a gloved finger to a chest in a cutoff T-shirt reading MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COWBOYS. “Young man, what are you protesting?”

  The student wet his lips. “Four hundred years of white aggression against my people.”

  “I see. And you, young lady?” He turned the finger on a heavyset female with short hair and a tribal tattoo on one cheek.

  “Same thing.”

  “I see. How about you?”

  One by one, the Russian asked the same question of fourteen young people who had stopped chanting and put down their signs to provide the same answer. Kalishnikov then returned his attention to the hulk in the shoulder-length hair.

  “How many parts Indian—”

  “Native American.” The protester bunched his chin.

  “I am native Russian myself. How many parts Native American are you?”

  “One-sixteenth Cherokee.”

  “Yes, that is the popular one. Pardon my atrocious comprehension of English and arithmetic, but do I understand that one-sixteenth of you has come here today to demonstrate against the actions of the remaining fifteen sixteenths?”

  The young man opened his mouth, closed it, colored, opened it again. “Bolshevik!”

  “That is very close to the word that occurred to me. Carry on.” He led the way into the theater as if he were the host and Valentino the visitor. As the boarded-over glass door drifted shut against renewed chants from outside, Valentino said, “May I ask what the point of that was? You can’t change their minds with fractions.”

  “Sorry I made you uncomfortable.” The Russian’s accent lightened, along with his diction. “Where I was born, a protest wasn’t a protest if it didn’t involve standing in front of a tank. Anyone can see the only Indians that bit the dust here did it up on the screen.” He snatched off a glove and laid a smooth palm against the mahogany side of the ticket booth, leaving a print like a child’s in the dust. “This belongs outside, under the marquee. They probably moved it to keep people from chucking rocks through the glass. See how it foreshortens the perspective in the lobby.”

  “Bad feng shui?”

  “Actually, it cuts ten feet off what should be a journey of wonder starting at the sidewalk. The whole point of these structures was to rescue you from reality long before the lights came down and the feature rolled. Did you notice the inconsistency in the stained-glass windows?”

  “Some panes are broken.”

  “Those can be replaced. I know a glazier in the Valley who specializes in restoring stained glass in churches and cathedrals. His shop looks like he moved it intact from eleventh-century Venice. He’s expensive, but he’s worth it. I was talking about the subjects: angel, angel, pastoral, knight.” He turned in a circle, stabbing a finger at each of the discolored windows. “A Teutonic knight, no less; note the Maltese Cross on his breastplate. That was Fink’s architect’s way of preparing the patrons for the variety of the fare that awaited them. Take a good look at the fellow’s face. Does he seem familiar?”

  Valentino studied the stern features under the slotted visor. “He looks like Francis X. Bushman.”

  “Good eye. The original glazier must have gone to see Ben-Hur while he was working on the project. The Archangel Gabriel bears a family resemblance to the Barrymores, and unless I miss my guess that milkmaid is Mary Pickford.”

  “I never noticed. It’s kind of tacky when you think about it.”

  “Tacky, yes, but with gravitas. Gothic sculptors were known to carve gargoyles into caricatures of their wealthy sponsors.”

  “I’m surprised Fink isn’t represented. The historical commission dedicated that plaque to him much later.”

  “Take a closer look at winged Pegasus.”

  He compared the sculpture’s equine features to the face on the plaque. “Holy Mother of—”

  “Max. She’s here, too, in plaster relief above the mezzanine entrance. I see they covered her when they suspended the ceiling over the landing. Let’s hope the squirrels haven’t gotten to her.”

 
“How do you know so much about this theater? Have you been here before?”

  “I never was able to work it into my schedule. I’ve seen so many across the country. But after we talked yesterday, I went to the Civic Center and had a long look at the building plans. They’re on file there, along with the Beaudry Reservoir and Dodger Stadium.”

  “I was down there just the other day. I didn’t think to look.” Valentino paused. “You don’t look like the kind of person who spends time going through dusty records.”

  “You should see my dry-cleaning bill. I started out in sweaters and jeans, just like any other contractor. My phone never rang. Then someone told me doing business in Hollywood is like attending one long masquerade party. So I became Vittorio De Sica out of Frank Lloyd Wright.” As he spoke, Kalishnikov took off his coat, hat, and jacket, and handed them to Valentino. By the time he put his studs in a pocket and turned back his cuffs he appeared older and less pudgy; a man getting ready to go to work. “Let’s assess the damage.”

  The archivist spent the next forty-five minutes following him around, carrying his outer clothes like a valet, while Kalishnikov pulled frayed wires spaghetti-fashion out of holes in the walls and flushed toilets and ran faucets in the restrooms and listened to the banging in the pipes as if he were a musical conductor isolating an untuned string in the violin section. It smacked faintly of affectation, but the designer muttered to himself in what sounded like peasant Russian and made close notes with a gold pencil on the inside of his starched cuffs. They covered the building from the attic, water-stained and streaked with pigeon droppings and bat guano, to the basement, where yellow police tape still festooned the room that was no longer a secret from anyone. No officers were present. Apparently the place had been squeezed dry of important clues and no one cared who tracked what onto those that remained.