Alive!

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I do, sir. Yes, I do.” It was one of the seminal moments of his life, experienced during one of the last afternoon movie broadcasts during the transition to cable; he’d run home from school to watch it. He hadn’t known then it was a disappointing attenuation of a franchise that had started out with such bold promise, only that it was an entertaining circus of crackling electrical equipment, men turning into beasts, and castles with squat turrets that were like nothing to be seen in Fox Forage, Indiana. It was a moment best left to adolescent memory, like a beloved children’s book that didn’t hold up under the cold light of adulthood. Valentino had often wished that he could see it again as he had that first time, before he learned how to spot stunt doubles and Raggedy-Ann dummies being flung off steep cliffs.

  Greenwood seemed to see what Valentino saw when he conjured up his mind’s eye. “Well, that’s what was on that brief strip of static film: Lugosi’s incandescent soul, caught in a jar. No one on earth could replicate it. I’m as sure as I m sitting here that that screen test exists, at least in part.”

  He almost didn’t want to ask the question, because he was sure he knew the answer. “Did he leave the strip with you?”

  “No, and I’m just as sorry about that as you are. He conducted business the same way he played cards, keeping everything close to his chest.”

  “One of my sources says Craig was very excited over a call he made not long before he was killed. It was to someone close to the Grundage family. He said something about being set for life, or words to that effect. That doesn’t sound like a man who was merely paying off a gambling debt.”

  “You seem to know a good deal more about the case than what was on the news.”

  Valentino realized he’d tipped his hand, to borrow Greenwood’s poker language. He knew a showdown with the police over his amateur detective work was inevitable, but he wanted to put it off as long as possible. “The news isn’t reporting everything the authorities know.” That at least was probably not a lie.

  “Are you suggesting Hunter was planning to hold me up for more money once he’d bought those reels on my behalf?”

  “I hate to speak poorly of someone who was once my friend, but an addict is capable of just about anything.”

  “And here I was considering paying him a finder’s fee for a job well done. Well, I’ve been a young fool and a middle-aged fool. I guess it was time I was an old fool.”‘

  “No fool ever built an empire from the ground up, as you did. Mr. Greenwood, I doubt very much you overlooked the possibility of a double cross.”

  The publisher had his cane in hand again. He studied the ornately cast silver wolf’s head. “What you’re saying is I beat him to death with this stick when the subject of extortion came up, and took the film off him.”

  “He wasn’t so far gone he couldn’t fight off a man more than twice his age, whatever sort of bludgeon you had.”

  “Now who’s playing the fool? People in my tax bracket don’t commit their own murders.”

  “Someone went to the trouble of breaking both his arms above the elbows to make it look like Mike Grundage was involved. I believed you when you said you didn’t know who had the film. Craig wouldn’t have told you, in case you decided to make an end run around him and buy it directly, and if you found out on your own, I believe that’s just what you’d have done, regardless of the markup. You wouldn’t take the chance of Craig offering it to someone else with a bigger bankroll: Mark David Turkus, for instance. Why pick Grundage to frame if you didn’t know he was involved?”

  Greenwood said, “For someone who spends all his time assembling pictures of dead people, you show a lot of knowledge about human nature.”

  “I often have to deal with the living in order to resuscitate the dead.”

  “If I didn’t already know all the lines by heart, I’d swear you were quoting an old horror movie.”

  “It sounded a little purple when I said it, sir. It must be the surroundings.”

  The publisher smiled fleetingly. “You’re right, of course, about just how far I trusted Hunter. He said the owner was reluctant to sell; that was just to boost the price. Having that strip meant he had the whole film, as no one hostile to the idea would bother to provide the go-between with proof it existed. You understand I had to string him along until I could figure out how to get him to part with it without my having to sell the farm.”

  “And the answer was . . . ?”

  “I was still working on it when I heard he was dead. A true collector leads with his heart, not his head. Would you like to see where it led me most recently?”

  Valentino nodded, not sure where the man was going. Greenwood levered himself up and approached one of the built-in cabinets loaded with eerie bric-a-brac. He manipulated a hidden switch. Again something whirred, and the cabinet slid sideways, disappearing into a pocket in the wall. In the recess left behind, a fluorescent light flickered on, setting aglow the stone-lithograph image encased in Plexiglas within. A gigantic man towering over a city’s skyscrapers stood half-crouched in the center of the poster, scooping up ordinary-size humans with both hands and shooting what appeared to be laser shafts from its eyes into the panicking crowd at his feet. The painting seemed to anticipate both King Kong and Superman, and certainly bore no resemblance to anything in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Yet there was that electrifying name, splashed across the top in bilious yellow letters, and beneath it and to one side, in a color-matched box, the legend:

  “…no man has ever

  seen his like ... no

  woman ever felt his

  white-hot kiss ...”

  Surpasses in THRILLS even

  DRACULA . . . world’s

  greatest hold over picture

  for 1930 . . . with

  BELA

  LUGOSI

  Dracula himself... as the

  leading spine-chiller . . .

  as a story it has thrilled

  the world for years.

  The archivist had seen the poster reproduced many times, the last time in a full-color catalogue issued by Christie’s auction house, but that was nothing compared to standing before the original. The inevitable closed tears and deterioration in the creases where it had been folded for shipping contributed to, rather than subtracted from, the effect; Valentino had learned to suspect items of this nature that seemed too pristine in the age of laser copying. The colors remained startlingly vibrant, and such reds and yellows were no longer seen outside vintage ephemera. The bases of the dyes had been found to be toxic or something and banned in most countries of the world. He had no doubt it was genuine.

  It had been advertised as the only known poster announcing Lugosi as the star of Frankenstein before he left the project. As a preproduction component, it may have been the only one ever made. The original artwork had probably been destroyed, the printing plates washed and recycled for the next project: Few in 1931 had thought such things would ever be as valuable as storage space. Christie’s had expected it would sell for between forty and sixty thousand dollars. Greenwood had bid a hundred thousand, securing ownership and establishing a record in the poster market, which had risen steadily ever since the pop-culture revolution of the 1960s.

  “Atrocious, isn’t it?” Greenwood said, gazing at it. “The artist obviously had never read the book. I doubt he even knew what it was about. The creature doesn’t even look like Lugosi; more like John Hodiak, who was about fifteen at the time and couldn’t have been the model. Of course, no one knew then whether Lugosi would be playing Dr. Frankenstein or the Monster, which gave the illustrator a blank slate, so to speak. I often wonder if the hacks who committed that Japanese atrocity Frankenstein Conquers the World in 1968 weren’t influenced by this image. No one saw a sixty-foot Monster on film until then. It was Nick Adams’ last picture. He killed himself not long after it wrapped.”

  “So many tragedies connected with the character.”

  “Isn�
��t it the truth? James Whale drowned himself, Colin Clive drank himself to death, Dwight Frye wound up in the gutter, remembered only as Dracula’s Renfield and Frankenstein’s hunchback. Valerie Hobson married high, but through no fault of her own found herself in the center of a sex scandal that brought down the British government. Maria Ouspenskaya, the gypsy woman, died smoking in bed, and of course we all know what happened to Lugosi.”

  “And now Craig Hunter.”

  Greenwood operated the switch, sealing off the poster. “Hammer Films was right. There is a Curse of Frankenstein.”

  “I suppose any franchise that has continued so long is bound to have its share of sad ends.”

  “Happy ones, too.” The publisher stroked the head of a fine alabaster bust of Boris Karloff sans makeup, as if for luck. “I saw the first one in a neighborhood theater when I was a boy. I identified with the Monster, who couldn’t help what he was, but was persecuted by ignorant villagers because he was different. I was a fat kid with asthma, a bully magnet. I couldn’t defend myself, but that poor clumsy brute with clodhopper feet could and did. I found justice there in the dark. Outside, I couldn’t even smack a wasp. Still can’t.”

  Valentino wanted to believe him, but he thought the man was working too hard to sell himself as an innocent. “Can you think of anyone who’d want that footage badly enough to kill for it?”

  “Dozens, but they’d have to know Hunter had it.”

  You might not have been the only customer he had lined up. Maybe he was running an auction of his own.”

  **

  He left Beverly Hills thinking that at least he knew now what he’d only suspected before: Craig Hunter had had the Frankenstein test. But what good was that? Acting on evidence wasn’t much better than playing a hunch. He wondered if he should go to Gill and Yellowfern with what he’d learned, take his medicine for interfering in an official investigation, and let them do the job they were trained for. The more questions he asked, the more convinced he was that Craig had engineered his own fate through greed, and once he’d found out how deep in the hole he was, had unreasonably called upon the last friend he had to dig him out. Even a lost cause like Craig wouldn’t expect him to take things further than he had already. Lorna herself had offered to release him from his promise.

  He took out his cell, hesitating before he called the operator to connect him with the San Diego Police Department. He’d gotten himself into serious trouble once for trying to keep a precious film property out of the corrosive atmosphere of an evidence room. Was he being inconsistent in the case of the Frankenstein test? Was consistency important?

  He was still deliberating, driving with his thumb hovering over the 0, when the cell rang. The screen read UNKNOWN CALLER. He often ignored such calls, which were usually from sneaky telemarketers. This time he took it, for no other reason than to postpone his decision.

  “Valentino?” A cold sort of voice, not mean or cruel, although he instinctively guessed it could be without effort.

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  “I asked first.”

  “This is Valentino. Your turn.” He had little patience with people who knew nothing of telephone etiquette.

  “My name is Mike Grundage. The reason I’m just now getting around to calling you is I just came away from another visit with the police, second morning in a row. Before that, I didn’t know you existed.”

  Valentino pulled into a loading zone in front of a restaurant. He couldn’t drive and have a conversation with a notorious underworld character at the same time.

  “I think you know what this is about,” Grundage said.

  “I only know someone I once knew is dead.”

  “There’s a lot of that going around. When can you be in San Diego?”

  “That’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive.”

  “I didn’t ask for travelers’ information.”

  It was barely mid-morning, but he had to consult with someone. “I can be there tonight, but I need to know if it’s worth the trip.” He heard his own voice shaking. He hoped it sounded like a bad connection on the other end.

  “You’re with some college, right?”

  “UCLA. Film Preservation Department.”

  “Colleges are always looking for money. I can swing some your way, strictly legit. No greasy bills tied with rubber bands.” His voice didn’t warm up when it chuckled. “It doesn’t all have to go on the books, though, if you get my drift.”

  “I’m not interested in personal profit, Mr. Grundage. I want to know about Craig Hunter, and what happened to something he had in his possession.”

  “I want to know about Hunter myself. I shouldn’t have to tell you the reason for that. About the other, well, you can clear up a lot just talking.”

  “Where do you want to meet?”

  “Little place called the Grotto. It’s on E Street. Miss it, you’re in the bay. Eight o’clock.”

  Valentino’s temperature dropped. “That’s the bar where Hunter was killed.”

  “Tavern. They serve food too. His body wound up there, sure enough. Another pain in the hip pockets. Business is down, but it’ll pick up.”

  “So you do own the Grotto.’

  “Come hungry. The Chicken Cordon Bleu’s from an old family recipe. You’ll be glad you had it.

  **

  CHAPTER

  13

  BROADHEAD SAID, “I’M going with you.

  Fanta said, “No, you’re not. You won’t fly, and you get carsick after twenty minutes.”

  Valentino had caught the pair together in Broadhead’s office, rare event. Something that looked like a large-scale map of the Salisbury Plain, complete with Stonehenge, turned out to be a seating chart for the wedding reception, spread out on the desk and spilling off the edges. The professor sat back making gurgling noises in the stem of his pipe while Fanta stood with a finger still planted on some sketched feature, like a general studying a battle plan.

  “My dear young lady,” Broadhead said, “I hiked across Manchuria, assembling documentary footage of Mao’s Long March. I don’t even like chow mein.”

  “You were my age. And you said you liked my chow mein.”

  “I wasn’t under oath. Now who’s kvetching about the age difference?”

  “I don’t care, but you’d slow Val down having to stop and puke every few miles. Who knows how a gangster will react if he’s late for dinner?”

  Valentino always enjoyed watching them bicker. “He might resent having to nuke the Chicken Cordon Bleu.”

  “That’s another thing. Eighty years of mob movies says all they eat is linguini and lasagna. What’s he say when he puts someone on the spot, An revoir?”

  Fanta ignored him. “What did Harriet say?”

  “I can’t reach her. She must be in a seminar.”

  “Text her.”

  “I doubt I can get it all on that tiny screen.”

  She took her finger from the seating chart and stabbed it at him. “Take dictation: WE NEED 2 TALK.”

  Broadhead said, “Only girls leave that message.”

  She moved so swiftly Valentino missed it. He heard a crack and she was pointing at him again, Broadhead rubbing at the pink print of her palm on the side of his face. “Send it. When she takes delivery on a fish wrapped in your sweatshirt, she’ll want to know what part I had in it.”

  “You know, you could give an old man a stroke, hitting him like that.”

  “Shut up, Kyle.” She glared at Valentino until he finished sending the text. “What about the police?”

  “I almost called them. But if they get to those test reels first, you know what will happen to them.”

  “Déjà vu. Greed. It’s how we met.” She blew a gust of air and started folding up the chart. “Someone should go with you, but it isn’t Kyle, and it isn’t me. I’ve canceled two appointments already with the director of the chapel. If I miss tonight, there’s just the Strikes ‘n’ S
pares. It’s a combination bowling alley and rib joint. The rate at which all the movie stars divorce, shuffle, and remarry, you can’t find a venue this side of Encino.”

  “What’s wrong with Encino?” Broadhead asked.

  “Hell-o.” She opened her mouth and jabbed her finger down her throat. “Every twenty minutes.”

  Valentino said, “I’d call Henry Anklemire in Information Services, but before I got halfway down the coast I’d aim the car at a telephone pole just to shut him up.”

  “Even if you got there, Grundage would whack you both the minute the little flack tried to sell him the Golden Gate Bridge. But none of these suggestions would intimidate a thug. He’d do you both in a heartbeat.”