Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call back right away,” Valentino said, stopping short of adding I thought it was Craig.

  “That’s all right. We sort of lost touch. These things are a little like cancer. Old friends stop coming around.’’ Candor like hers had kept the couple away from Hollywood parties. “I was wondering if you’d heard from Craig lately.”

  “He called me last night from San Diego.”

  “Did he say where in San Diego?”

  He hesitated only briefly. There were no secrets between the divorced. “A bar. He didn’t say which one.”

  “He must have used a pay phone. His cell carrier dropped him when he stopped paying his bills. Did the number come up?

  “I didn’t check. He woke me up. If it was a pay phone, it probably came up ‘out of area.’”

  “Oh. What did he want?”

  “He said he needed my help, but Lorna—”

  “I know, Val. You don’t have to say it. I reached the end of my own rope last week. He showed up here late, drunk or high or both, acting like the house was still his—me, too. I had to threaten to call the police to get him to leave.”

  “Did he threaten yow?” Craig had always been sloppy and maudlin under the influence, never violent.

  “No, nothing like that. He just wouldn’t leave. But when I mentioned the police, he seemed to sober up right away. He mumbled something about being ungrateful and slunk on out. I offered to call him a cab—he was in no condition to drive— but he acted as if he didn’t hear me. I heard his car start up and leave. I’ve been worried sick ever since. I kept thinking he’d gone off Mulholland or something and was in a ravine somewhere. You don’t know how relieved I am he called you.”

  “Why do you think he was so worried about your calling the police? Forgive me, but it wouldn’t be the first night he spent in jail.”

  “I have no idea. You don’t suppose he’s mixed up with the Mexicans and Colombians again?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a short hop from San Diego to Tijuana.”

  “But what kind of help could you have given him?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I’d asked, but it was late and—” he’d been calling me all day, again he’d stopped short. In the light of this conversation, so persistent an appeal for help made Valentino look as bad as he felt for ignoring it. “You said he acted like the house was still his. What did he say that gave you that impression?”

  “Oh, he was just being possessive. Should I call Missing Persons?”

  “They’ll probably just tell you to wait forty-eight hours, and I heard from him just last night.” The abrupt change of subject, and the evasiveness of her answer to his question, made him curious. Far from keeping secrets from each other, he wondered if the Hunters were sharing one.

  “Will you call me if you hear from him again?” she asked.

  “You don’t have to ask, Lorna.”

  “I know, Val. Thank you.” The connection broke.

  He was compelled to call Harriet. Part of the resentment he felt toward Craig Hunter had had nothing to do with Craig’s wasted life. Some small part of him had always wished he’d met Lorna first, and he felt guilty as well as impatient with himself for clinging to that ghost when he was so contented with what he had.

  Harriet didn’t answer. She was probably attending a panel and had her cell turned off. When her voice mail kicked in, he hung up without leaving a message. He’d managed to shift his burden to her for not being available, and wondered if she was sitting with her hunky ex-FBI agent.

  The telephone rang while his hand was still on it. It was Harriet.

  “Did you just try to call?” she asked.

  “Yes. I figured you were busy.”

  “Are you angry about something?”

  He felt a fresh flush of guilt. She had a better right to be jealous of him. He’d never mentioned Lorna to her. “I’m just a little tired.” He told her about yesterday, leaving out Craig Hunter. That route led to questions, lies, and other evasions, and he was a stranger in such country.

  “Oh, Val, you loved that chair.”

  “It’s just a piece of furniture,” he said. “It’s been recovered a couple of times since Bogie and Greenstreet sat in it. I was the custodian for a while. It’s time to let someone else take the responsibility.”

  “Someone like Teddie Goodman?”

  “I’d rather not think about that. If the chair performs up to expectations, I can electrify the marquee and replace the plumbing with PVC pipe.”

  “I thought you said copper was best.”

  “It is, but the joints have to be soldered, and the State of California in its desire to protect its citizens has outlawed all products containing lead.”

  “And you said having a movie star in office would be a good thing.”

  “Well, they didn’t let him bring along his special effects. How’s the convention?”

  “Dull today. The blowhard from Scotland Yard’s debating the know-it-all from NYPD about whose electron microscope is bigger. Jeff and I are going to play hooky and brunch on top of the Space Needle.”

  “Jeff?”

  “Jeff Talbot, the antiques fed. Didn’t I mention his name?”

  “Oh, him.” He wondered if they were staying at the same hotel. He’d forgotten she was a detective as well as a scientist. “He’s a happily married man, Val. When he’s not going on about Depression glass he’s talking about his wife, whom I’m sure trusts him.”

  “I trust you. I just miss you.”

  “I miss you, too, but I’ve only been gone a couple of days. It isn’t like I shipped out with the marines.” Elevators dinged in the background. She must have been waiting in the lobby. “There he is. Call you later.”

  The conversation ended before he could point out she’d said that before and hadn’t called before he called her. Which was just as well. They seldom quarreled in person, but long distance was always a challenge.

  He took last night’s Peter Gunn reels from his briefcase, marked as they were with bright yellow tabs where rediscovered material could be substituted for jump cuts, and placed them with his notes and instructions in a cardboard interoffice envelope. Then he called Jason Stickley’s cell. A sepulchral voice that might have been the intern’s, electronically enhanced, asked him to leave a message. Behind it, for some reason, clanged “The Anvil Chorus.” The boy’s resistance to categorization vexed the born archivist in Valentino. He asked Jason to come to his office when he had a chance.

  When he arrived, breathless as usual and carrying a dry cleaner’s garment bag covering something on a hanger over his shoulder, he wore a collapsible silk top hat with his usual jeans and T-shirt. The tall-crowned headgear underscored his attenuated anatomy, putting Valentino in mind of an undertaker in a black-and-white western.

  Valentino, more curious than ever, but more determined than ever not to waste so important a professional tool as curiosity on something other than work, indicated the cardboard envelope balanced atop a stack of DVDs on the corner of his desk. “I need you to take that to the lab. The film editors are expecting it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Reluctance or embarrassment clouded the thin face. “Would it be okay if I left this in your office until tonight?” He lifted and resettled the garment bag on his shoulder. Something metallic jingled inside. “I’m going straight to a party from my last class and won’t have time to go home and change.”

  “What, and clutter up the place?”

  Jason cast his gaze down. Underclassmen were humor-challenged.

  “I’m kidding. No objections. Isn’t it a little early for a costume party? Halloween isn’t for two weeks.”

  “It isn’t a costume party. Well, it is, but that isn’t the point. Thanks, Mr. Valentino. I’d have asked Ruth to stash it under her desk, but I’m afraid she’d throw it out. She already thinks I’m a satanist or something.”

  “She thinks everyone’s something or so
mething else.” He took the intern’s statement to mean that he could rule out devil-worshipper from the list of possibilities. “Are you going to leave the hat, or is that what freshmen are wearing this semester?”

  Jason had hung the garment bag on a set of wall-mounted moose antlers from North West Mounted Police (and later the set of Sergeant Preston of the Yukon) and turned to pick up the envelope, still wearing the top hat. He said, “Whoops,” and hung it next to the bag. “That reminds me: I have to go to the junkyard over lunch.”

  Valentino wasn’t aware that young men frequented junkyards anymore. The intern didn’t look like the hot-rod type. More to the point, he couldn’t understand how a high silk hat would remind anyone of auto salvage. There were times, at age thirty-three, when he felt as out of touch as a man of ninety.

  He had work to do, but when he was alone his attention kept wandering toward the transparent plastic bag, beyond which was solid black. Snooping was an invasion of privacy. After several attempts to focus on business, however, professional inquisitiveness got the better of good manners. He stood and lifted the hem of the bag.

  Inside was a frock coat made of black broadcloth with black satin lapels, and under it gray flannel trousers with pinstripes. Over these hung a white linen shirt with ruffles and a starched wing collar attached to it with studs. The material was rich, not at all the thin shoddy that one found in costume rental shops. It belonged in a Merchant Ivory film set in Victorian London.

  Except for the chain.

  This was not designed to secure a pocket watch. The links were case steel, each about an inch and a half long, and as thick as his little finger, a cargo chain forged to support heavy loads, incongruously coiled around the hook of a clothes hanger and joined at the ends by a brass lock the size of the palm of his hand, ornately embossed with an ivy design. He could insert his thumb in the top of the keyhole.

  If Jason hadn’t sworn it wasn’t a costume party, Valentino would have decided he was going as Harry Houdini, and laid his curiosity to rest. Now it burned brighter than ever. And why a junkyard?

  The intercom buzzed. He jumped, letting the plastic drop into place, and took two deep breaths to slow his heart rate before answering.

  Ruth used the instrument rarely, and usually only when he had visitors. Lately she’d begun putting telephone calls through without asking permission or identifying the callers. Every month, it seemed, she came up with a new imperious way to demonstrate to her superiors that they were temporary annoyances at best. In the beginning was Ruth, and she would be there at end of days.

  “The cops are here,” she said. And it’s about time, her tone implied.

  “Which one, Sergeant Clifford or Lieutenant Padilla?” The weary question reminded him that his was not the life of the ordinary university consultant. The last two times police had invaded his department had involved homicide investigations.

  “This one’s a Sergeant Fish. I didn’t get his partner’s name.” Which meant she hadn’t bothered to listen. She flipped the switch on her end before he could respond.

  He rose as two men entered. The first had short sandy hair and clean-shaven cheeks with a suggestion of baby fat. He appeared to be not much older than Valentino’s intern, but his eyes were not boyish. The other man, older, had the bold nose and flat cheeks of an American Indian. He wouldn’t have looked out of place in plaited hair and feathers, chasing the cast of Stagecoach across the floor of Monument Valley.

  “Sergeant Fish?” He automatically held his hand out for the older man to take.

  The younger man took it. “Gill. Ernest Gill. This is my partner, Detective John Yellowfern.” He broke off the handshake to show a gold-and-enamel badge pinned to a leather folder. Yellowfern flashed his for a tenth of a second, then snapped shut the folder and returned it to his pocket with a flourish like a gunslinger twirling his weapon into its holster.

  “I’m sorry my secretary is bad with names.”

  “Isn’t that kind of what a secretary’s supposed to be good at?” the Indian said.

  “Settle down, John. Mr. Valentino, we’re with the San Diego Police.”

  San Diego went off in his head like a late-night telephone bell. “Is this about Craig Hunter?”

  Yellowfern said, “Heard from him recently, did you?” He made it sound like he’d broken the case, if there was a case. Valentino didn’t think he and the detective were going to get along.

  “He called me last night from a bar there. He was drunk. If I’d thought he was driving—”

  “He wasn’t in an accident,” Gill said. “His body was found in the men’s room of a place called the Grotto at one fifty-five this morning. The medical examiner says he was beaten to death.”

  **

  CHAPTER

  4

  BEATEN TO DEATH. He’d heard the phrase in movies and on television hundreds of times, but it had never carried the grisly picture that flashed into his mind when it was applied to a friend. Friend? Some friend Valentino was.

  Numbly, he cleared piles of bound scripts and publicity stills from a pair of scoop chairs and sank into his own behind the desk. While Gill sat, Yellowfern wandered the room, looking at the posters on the walls and lifting carved and molded figures and turning them upside-down as if searching for marks identifying their rightful owners.

  Gill opened a small memorandum book with a pebbled cover. “Phone company says Hunter placed a long-distance call to your home from the Grotto at one sixteen. What did you talk about?”

  “He said he needed help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Yellowfern turned from a framed invitation to the premiere of Ben-Hur in 1925. “He asked you for help and didn’t say what it was?”

  “I didn’t give him the chance. I hung up on him and unplugged the phone.”

  “That how you treat all your friends in trouble?”

  “John,” Gill said warningly.

  Valentino wasn’t fooled. He’d had experience with police and seen enough crime dramas to know when he was being double-teamed. “I assumed he was putting the arm on me, as usual. He’d obviously been drinking or worse. It wouldn’t have been the first time he hit me up for a loan, but this time I didn’t have any cash to spare. In his condition, he’d just use it to put more poison in his system. I told him if it was help he needed, he should get the professional kind.”

  “He say anything else?” Gill asked.

  “He said he’d make it worth my while.”

  “What do you think he meant by that?”

  “I have no idea. At the time, I thought he was stalling to keep me on the line until he got me to change my mind. Did you catch the person responsible?”

  “Sure,” Yellowfern snarled. “We drove all the way up here from San Diego in rush-hour traffic just to tell you we caught the guy. While we’re here we’ll pay a call on everybody who knew Hunter and let ‘em know they can sleep nights.”

  Gill said, “We’re working on it. We know robbery wasn’t the motive. He still had his wristwatch and sixty dollars in his wallet. If it was money Hunter was after, it was more than he needed just to settle his bar tab.”

  “Maybe the robber panicked and ran.”

  Yellowfern put his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth on his heels. “His arms were broken just above the elbows. It’s a local signature. Grundage muscle does it all the time.”

  “Mike Grundage?”

  “You know the name?” Sergeant Gill leaned forward.

  “I watch television and read the papers. A grand jury’s investigating organized crime in the motion picture industry and he’s the star witness. What would Craig Hunter have to do with a thug like Grundage?”

  Gill said, “We were hoping you could tell us. That’s why we drove clear up here in rush-hour traffic.”

  “I wish I could help. The picture business is brutal enough without gangsters getting involved.�
�

  “Tough break, seeing as how you’re so good at helping.”