Blue Screen

by Robert B. Parker

  “When she came to me she had nothing,” Trixie said.

  “Except the body,” I said.

  Trixie giggled once.

  “She had that. But she was nowhere. She hadn’t done anything. She didn’t know anybody [giggle]. She was nowhere.”

  “And you helped her,” I said.

  “I got her acting lessons. I got her an Alexander trainer.”

  “Alexander?”

  “Posture and breathing,” Trixie said and giggled. “I taught her how to dress. I mean, she had expensive clothes and a lot of them. But they were in awful taste, you know [giggle]? I got her a new wardrobe, and I made sure she wore it to the right places and was seen by the right people.”

  “Pygmalion,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  I shook my head.

  “Just someone I knew who had a similar problem. What was she doing when she came to you?”

  “Doing?”

  “For a living,” I said. “To pass the time. I gather she was not yet an actress.”

  “Oh, no [giggle], she surely wasn’t.”

  “So what was she?” I said.

  “I have no idea.”

  “She never said?”

  Trixie giggled and shook her head.

  “She married?”

  Giggle and shrug.

  “Do you have an address for her?”

  “You can get her through the studio or Buddy Bollen’s office,” Trixie said.

  “No,” I said, “I mean when she worked for you.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Could you find it?”

  Giggle.

  “Now?” I said.

  “You want it now?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She giggled again.

  “Well, okay, I guess.”

  She got up and went out of her office for a while. I sat in the small room with its small, cold fireplace behind the desk. There was a gas log but it wasn’t lit. On the walls were head shots of a bunch of actors I didn’t know and a couple I sort of did. There were also a couple of posters for television movies. I read the posters carefully and looked at all the pictures, and got up and went to the window and looked down at Montana Avenue for a time, and finally Trixie returned.

  “My assistant is on her honeymoon [giggle], and the files are in disarray.”

  “But you found an address?”

  “Yes. She wouldn’t be there now.”

  I nodded. Trixie handed me a piece of notepaper with an address.

  “It’s in Santa Monica,” she said. “Off San Vicente, I think.”

  “I’ll find it,” I said. “Anything else you can tell me about her?”

  Trixie shrugged and giggled.

  “She was a bitch,” Trixie said.

  “There’s always one,” I said.

  Trixie giggled.

  16

  ERIN ’S FORMER MANAGER had a desk in a little cubicle in a warren of little cubicles occupied by a large management agency on Beverly Boulevard. He was a wispy, middle-aged man with a swell tan and thick, white hair worn longish and brushed straight back. His name was Ash Crawford.

  “She needed more managing than I could give her,” he said when I asked him to talk about Erin. “Wild child.”

  “Was she married?” I said.

  “Said she was. I never met him.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  Ash Crawford smiled like a happy uncle.

  “‘My husband,’” he said. “That’s all she ever called him.”

  “Where did she live?”

  “Santa Monica, near Seventh Street, I think. I used to meet her sometimes at the bar at Shutters.”

  “Do you have an address?” I said.

  “Bet I do.”

  He turned to the computer on his desk and worked for a moment.

  “Here you go,” he said.

  The printer started up and a page came out. He handed it to me. It was the same address Trixie had given me. There was a phone number, too. But it was not likely to be useful. I folded the printout and put it in my purse.

  “So when did you start managing her?” I said.

  “Start of her career. She was still trying to break into the business when she came to me. I got her an agent.”

  “Who?”

  “Trixie Wedge.”

  “She a good one?” I said

  “She’s as good as you’re going to get with no track record”—Crawford smiled—“and no discernible talent.”

  “Why did you take her on?” I said.

  “The look. You don’t see many people who look like Erin Flint.”

  “You felt that would be enough?”

  “Yes. We could teach her the rest.”

  “Talent?” I said.

  He smiled again.

  “Film can be edited,” he said.

  “So you can, ah, create a performance?”

  “Sure,” Crawford said. “It’s not like the stage. In the editing room, you have enough film, you can make anyone better than they are.”

  “Erin is better than she was?” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Yikes,” I said.

  “Fearful to consider, isn’t it.”

  “What was her big break?” I said.

  “Meeting Buddy Bollen,” Crawford said.

  “How did that happen?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know she’d met him until she fired me. Said Buddy was handling her now. I told her Buddy’s a producer. It’s like the chicken being handled by the fox.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said in this case she was the fox, and see you later.”

  “Do you know about her new movie?” I said.

  “I heard she was making one about some great female athlete.”

  “When I talk to her and Buddy,” I said, “they talk as if it’s done.”

  “Hell,” Crawford said, “I don’t know. But people like Erin and Buddy, it has been made. Once the deal is done. The rest is just mechanics.”

  “Making the movie,” I said.

  “Yes. It’s like a new car you haven’t driven yet. But you own it. It’s there in your driveway.”

  “All you have to do is drive it,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. For Erin and Buddy, most of the hard work is over. Probably never was hard work for Erin. She just has to walk around and look like Erin. And by now, Buddy has his financing wired. He’ll have his distribution deal, he’s got a director and a line-producer type, whatever his title is, and a full crew to actually make the movie. Buddy doesn’t have to do a lot of hands-on. And Erin—the work is hard. Long hours, lotta retakes, boredom, she does most of her stunts, but it’s stuff she can do. She gets the biggest trailer on the set, and everyone calls her Miss Flint, and she’s a star.”

  I nodded.

  “When I was married,” I said, “we had a contractor working for us at our house once. There was a set of kneepads in among the rest of his tools. I asked him if they were for laying tile. He said no, they were for getting the job.”

  “Exactly,” Crawford said. “You understand the business.”

  “Oh hooray,” I said. “How about her personal assistant, Misty Tyler?”

  Crawford shrugged and shook his head.

  “Don’t know her,” he said. “I assume it’s a her.”

  “Do you know any guys named Misty?” I said.

  He laughed.

  “You never know for sure anymore.”

  “Melissa Tyler,” I said.

  “Never heard of her. She must have arrived after I got the boot. When I had Erin, she didn’t need a personal assistant.” He smiled. “Except me.”

  “What was she doing when she came to you?”

  “Doing?”

  “You know, work, career, whatever. How did she spend her days.”

  “Working out, as far as I know.”

  “That’s all?”

  “All I know about,” he said. “I think she
belonged to Sports Club/LA.”

  “Isn’t that pricey?”

  “It is.”

  “And how did she get there from Santa Monica?” I said.

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Drove, I suppose.”

  “So she had a car.”

  “Yeah, one of those little Mercedes with the retractable hard top.”

  “Not cheap,” I said.

  “I suppose not,” Crawford said.

  “So what did she do to earn it?” I said.

  “Maybe the hubby had some money,” he said.

  “She implied a couple,” I said.

  “Of husbands?” Crawford said. “Could be. I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Was she a feminist when you knew her?” I said.

  He smiled.

  “When I knew her all she wanted was to be a star,” he said.

  “I don’t think she ever really thought about anything else.”

  “Now she is a feminist.”

  “She plays a kind of female Schwarzenegger,” he said.

  “So she is living up to the role,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “And now she’s a star.”

  “Stars are feminists?”

  “Most of the stars are liberal,” Crawford said. “Except for the Mel Gibson wing. But the official position for a star is feminist, antiracist, gay rights, antiwar, civil liberties, environmental. Their views aren’t righter or wronger than those held by any collection of airheads. Say me, for instance, and you. But stars have access, so what they think actually gets treated as if it mattered.”

  “Which it doesn’t,” I said.

  “No more than your opinion or mine,” he said.

  “Nor, I suppose, any less,” I said.

  Crawford sat back from his little desk in his little cubicle with his hands folded across his flat stomach. He smiled.

  “Maybe a little less,” he said.

  17

  THE ADDRESS in Santa Monica, which Erin Flint had once used, was a stucco bungalow down 7th Street hill and bear left in the Canyon. It was surrounded by flowers and had an oblique but discernible view of the ocean. I parked on the street and walked to the front door. There was the California smell: flowers, fruit trees, olives smashed on the sidewalk, the mild astringency of the sea air from the Pacific. It was November. When I had left Boston it was 27 degrees and gray. Santa Monica, this afternoon, was bright sun and 73. The West Coast had its moments.

  There was a Big Wheel on the patio, and a barbecue pit among the flowers. I rang the doorbell.

  A big blonde woman answered. She was wearing a yellow tank top and white short shorts and no shoes. Her hair was in a long single braid, and she looked like I’d always imagined a Rhine maiden would look.

  “Hi,” I said. “My name is Sunny Randall and I’m a detective from Boston looking into a matter for Erin Flint.”

  “The movie star?” the Rhine maiden said. “We bought this house from her.”

  “I know she used to live here,” I said.

  “Her and her sister,” the Rhine maiden said. “Though she wasn’t Erin Flint when we bought it from her.”

  “Really?” I said. “Can we talk?”

  “Sure, come on in,” she said. “Want some coffee?”

  “Thanks, I’d love some,” I said. “You are?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m Janey Murphy. Mrs. Charles Trent actually, but I use my birth name.”

  Janey Murphy. So much for Rhine maiden. We sat in her kitchen at a freestanding tile-top counter and she poured us coffee. The sound of kitchen activity brought a sleepy-looking bulldog lumbering hopefully in from wherever he’d been recently asleep.

  “Ohmigod,” I said, “a dog. I’m in dog withdrawal. May I pat her?”

  “Of course,” Janey said. “Her name is Sprite.”

  The dog lumbered over and sat by my foot. I got off the stool and crouched down to pat her. She wasn’t after patting. She was after food. But she accepted patting with dignity. Better, no doubt, than nothing.

  “Sprite?” I said. “What does she weigh?”

  “Sixty pounds,” Janey said.

  “That’s sprightly,” I said.

  “My husband has an odd sense of humor,” Janey said. “But she’s very sweet. She’s wonderful with my daughter.”

  “I have a bull terrier,” I said.

  “Like the beer dog?”

  “Yes. But a miniature. Rosie.”

  “I’ll bet she’s adorable.”

  “Entirely,” I said. “So what was Erin Flint’s name when you bought the house.”

  “It’s on the closing documents. Her name was Ethel Boverini. I remember because it so doesn’t sound like she looks.”

  “And her sister?”

  “Edith,” Janey said.

  I sat back up on the stool and drank some coffee. Sprite went around the freestanding counter and gazed up at Janey. She took a dog biscuit from a ceramic canister and handed it to the dog.

  “Edith Boverini?” I said.

  “Yes. They owned the house together.”

  “Ethel and Edith,” I said.

  “Yes. It’s funny. We didn’t even know their real names until it came time to sign the documents. My husband’s a lawyer. He brought it up at the closing. Delayed everything until he could establish for certain that they were the actual owners and could sell us the house unencumbered.”

  She smiled and gave Sprite another biscuit.

  “You know how lawyers are,” she said.

  “I do,” I said. “What names were they using?”

  “Well, Erin, of course, and the sister. I think Erin called her Misty.”

  “Misty Tyler?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know that I ever knew their last names. They just called each other Erin and Misty. Almost like they were practicing.”

  So Misty had known Erin a long time. Since they’d been Ethel and Edith Boverini. All her life.

  “You have a daughter,” I said.

  My father always contended that when you were questioning people it was good sometimes to make it like a chat. I thought he was right. Especially when they weren’t a suspect and you were just vamping for information.

  “Yes, she’s in kindergarten.”

  “And your husband’s an attorney.”

  “Entertainment law.” She smiled. “In Beverly Hills. I’m his trophy wife.”

  “Good for him,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “Good for us both,” she said.

  “Anything else you can tell me about the Boverini sisters?” I said.

  She shrugged. “House was nice and clean when we looked at it and when we moved in. No surprises. Everything worked as advertised.”

  “Any mail ever come for them after they moved?”

  “No. It was odd, I mean, doesn’t that usually happen? We never got a single thing meant for them.”

  “No one ever knocked on the door looking for them?”

  “Just you,” Janey said.

  “May I give Sprite a cookie?” I said.

  “Of course,” Janey said. “It’s part of her job. Eating cookies, sleeping, lapping your face, accepting hugs. I’m not sure she likes the hug part so much.”

  “Funny,” I said. “That’s the part I like best.”

  We both laughed. Just a couple of girls in a clean, quiet house, having coffee and chatting in the bright kitchen. Husband at work. Kid in school. I envied her.

  Sort of.

  18

  THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY birth, death, and marriage records are located in the County Clerk’s office in Norwalk, down US5 a ways, not too far from Whittier. I spent some time there, and by late afternoon I knew that Ethel Boverini had been born in April of 1970, in El Segundo, and that Edith had been born a year later, in June. The mother was Rosalie Boverini; the father was unknown. Rosalie herself, if it was the same one, was born in 1955. In the marriage records there was no evidence that Rosalie ever ma
rried. But there was a record of Ethel Boverini marrying Gerard Basgall in 1988. And in the death records, I found that Rosalie Boverini died in October of 1987. There was no record of Edith Boverini marrying or giving birth. There was no record of Ethel giving birth.

  When I got back to my hotel it was early evening. There was a message from Tony Gault saying he was tied up with clients this evening and hoped we could get together tomorrow. I smiled. Poor baby, probably needed time to build up his sperm count. In fact, the prospect of a long shower, a comfortable robe, a glass of wine, and something lovely from room service was more enticing than Tony after a long day in the records office.

  God bless good hotels. My room was orderly, my bed turned back. My ice bucket had been filled. I took a shower and put on a big, white terry-cloth robe, which was pleasantly too big for me, so that it wrapped well around me and I had to roll the sleeves up. I poured myself a glass of wine from the minibar and sat in the armchair by the window and looked out across Wilshire Boulevard at Beverly Hills. The television clicker was on my bed table. I decided against it.

  The silent statistics of birth, marriage, and death had told me a lot. None of it told me anything about who killed Misty Tyler, aka Edith Boverini. But it told me some things about the life she and her older sister must have led. Erin, aka Ethel, would have been born, apparently out of wedlock, when her mother was about fifteen. The double names were making my head hurt. I decided to think of them as Erin and Misty. I smiled to myself at the quaintness of my phraseology. Out of wedlock. Come to think of it, I too, at the moment, was out of wedlock. Erin’s mother died at age thirty-two, when Erin would have been seventeen. She was eighteen when she married. There was no indication that she had ever given birth, at least in LA County. So the girls were orphaned at seventeen and sixteen. And Erin was married a year later to Gerard Basgall. I looked up Basgall in the phone book. There were no Basgalls, but it was only for the west side of LA.

  I looked at my watch. It was quarter of ten in the east. I picked up the phone and called the police in Paradise, Massachusetts.

  “This is Sunny Randall,” I said to the night-desk cop. “I don’t suppose Chief Stone is still there.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “And I don’t suppose you can give me his home phone number,” I said.

  “That information is not available,” he said.