by Ed Kurtz
I muttered something I wouldn’t say in front of anybody’s mother and wandered back downstairs and out to the sidewalk. I’d passed a cluttered little souvenir shop on the way here that was just up at the corner, and I remembered a sign in the window advertising their ridiculous prices for cigarettes. Six minutes later I dropped eight bucks on a soft pack of Pall Malls and had one in my mouth before I left the shop.
So the elusive Ms. Wheeler failed to have me picked up at the airport and she wasn’t in the office when I expected her to be. She’d paid me—if she hadn’t, I’d likely be en route back to LAX by then—but I had no idea if or when I’d start earning my keep. I was starting to get a little grouchier than usual and entirely unsure how to proceed. For want of a better idea, I returned to the door on the second floor of her building and knocked again, louder and longer. Nothing, as I expected, so for a last-ditch effort I called her number again.
On the other side of the locked door, a mobile phone chirped with its preset ringtone. I jumped a little.
I took the phone down from my ear, but I let it ring and listened to the sound coming from inside. It kept going until I pressed END. I supposed people left their phones behind all the time—I knew I’d done so on many an occasion—but it didn’t gibe well with me. Not with everything else amounting to her total absence since I’d landed in Los Angeles. I felt a small tremble in my knees and knocked again, softer.
“Ms. Wheeler? Leslie?”
Footsteps sounded on the wooden stairs behind me. I turned to see a small woman coming up on the landing. When she saw me standing there, she gasped, “Oh!”
I said, “Ms. Wheeler?”
The woman laughed. She was short and bony, her iron gray hair pulled back into a girlish ponytail. She stretched her thin mouth into a smile and said, “No, I’m Barbara Tilitson. You must be Mr. Woodard.”
Another member of the sewing circle, I decided. She walked slowly toward me, digging a jangling key ring from her knitted purse.
“That’s me,” I told her.
“Is she not in? I’m surprised. Probably stuck in traffic. I can’t imagine the traffic in your neck of the woods can best ours.”
“I tried her cell phone and heard it ringing inside,” I said. “That is, I assume it was hers. Could be a coincidence, I guess…”
“Well, let’s just see,” Barbara said with a pleasant lilt. She jabbed a bronze key into the doorknob and pushed the door open. I followed her into the dark room and waited for her to switch on a light. When she did, I squinted and looked at what was once probably a pleasant room, furnished with antiques and decorated with framed reproductions of classic one-sheets for silent pictures—but the place had been smashed up by someone who knew about smashing. There were turned-over chairs, broken glass, and the rug on the floor had been pulled up and tossed into a pile in the corner. All of the posters had been ripped out of their frames, like somebody was looking to see if there was anything behind them. In one, America’s Sweetheart Mary Pickord knelt reproachfully in a nightgown beneath the title A Good Little Devil. Beside the poster, a plump woman with short salt-and-pepper hair slumped in a faux leather club chair.
Barbara Tilitson screamed.
I knew then why Leslie Wheeler had been giving me the slip since my arrival. She was dead.
4
Hollywood, 1926
The abduction took twice as long to film as Jack anticipated, putting the production a few hours behind schedule. The heavy, a character actor by the name of Billy Terence, kept fumbling awkwardly over Grace when he was supposed to be exerting villainous force, afraid to offend the lady. Jack alternately whined and bellowed, commanding Billy to grab her, dominate her, own her. At first Billy blanched, beside himself in spite of his rough looks. Only when Grace touched him gently on his rocky, weathered face and told him it was all right, that they were only performing, could he get the scene right.
By then, it was well past one in the afternoon and there were still five pages left to finish. Jack leapt from his chair, ordered the take golden, and screamed at everyone to move quickly to the next set. Cast and crew scuttled, moving equipment and changing costumes en route to the other end of the stage. There, an avant garde cemetery replete with angular tombstones and a high black fence stood in shadows, waiting to be illumined by stage lights. Once the light spilled down in sharply angled slats, Jack lighted a cigarette and directed the players to their positions.
Also smoking was the barrel-chested youth who shadowed the chief electrician, Horace, like a lost pup. As Grace floated over to her director, now dressed in a semi-transparent gown with a plunging neckline, the young man smiled awkwardly at her. She ignored him and paused at the edge of the set to talk to Jack.
“Ready to die, pretty thing?”
His starlet feigned an awkward grin and nodded, once.
Behind her, hurrying to form a semicircle around a flat tomb, were six day players in long brown robes tied at the waist with frayed ropes. Grace turned slowly to face them. The half dozen faces regarded her with deference, as though she were already a star, equal to Lillian Gish, Clara Bow. Anyone. The tops.
The director said, “Let’s get the scene done today if we can. No sense in wasting Mr. Veritek’s time or money.”
Grace took her place, lying on her back along the length of the faux tomb. Her tormentors shuffled in close. The one at the head of the tomb fingered a stage dagger jammed in the rope at his middle.
It was time to bring the Angel to the Abyss.
Jack growled, “Action.”
* * *
They guide her down, flat as an ironing board, upon the cold stone slab. She is pliant. They work in tandem, hands exchanging her silken flesh until she is, at last, in position. Like a well-oiled machine. Her eyes are open—wide, glassy—but she does not see. Above her, torches flutter flames and pale, angular faces change shapes in the dancing shadows of the light. At the head of the slab, in front of a narrow gray monument, stands one taller than his brethren—the chief minister, perhaps, if such groups have ministers—and he stretches his long white fingers out over her, snatching at air. The others sway slightly in a measured rhythm, join hands. The head man’s hands vanish into the folds of his robe and a pair of disciples, one on either side of her, whisk away the thin fabric that barely conceals her goose-pimpled form. The torches play havoc with the contours of her naked body and the minister produces a strange dagger, shaped like a serpent, and he strikes…
* * *
“A specter!” cried Saul Veritek, his right hand concerned with a tumbler filled to the brim with gin while his left played with some blonde bit player’s hair. “Risen from the grave!”
Grace Baron stood in the foyer of the suite, resplendent in her peach crepe gown. Lace at her neck, beneath the pearls that glittered in the chandelier light. If she imagined she heard a gasp, she wouldn’t have been wrong.
The band, all but the pianist Negro, played “Rhapsody in Blue.” Gowned and tuxedoed partygoers danced drowsily in pairs scattered throughout the suite, most of them clutching their drinks more desperately than their partners. Prohibition, it seemed to Grace, had only made liquor flow more freely in Los Angeles.
“Come,” said Saul, releasing his blonde and taking Grace by the elbow. “Have a libation. It isn’t every party that has a virgin sacrifice among its throng.”
His pink pate gleamed with sweat as he led her to the bar, where a Filipino barman was shaking up a martini for a tall, handsome man with a craggy face. Grace squinted at him, then whispered to Saul, “Isn’t that William Hart?”
Saul chuckled. “In the flesh. On his way out, the old cowboy. He’s been pumping everybody he sees for cash, trying to make his own last hurrah. Tumbleweeds, he calls it. Can you imagine? With Tom Mix filling movie houses he wants to make some drab old bore called Tumbleweeds?”
“I saw him in The Scourge of the Desert when I was a girl. We got a lot of oaters back in Idaho.”
“Folks liked that sort of
thing back then,” Saul said. “What, you’re starstruck? Come now, I’ll introduce you.”
He guided her to the bar and extended two fingers to the barman. “A couple of gin and tonics, would you, Manny?”
Manny nodded and got to work. Saul turned to Hart and tapped his shoulder. Hart sipped his martini and looked down with a tired smile.
“Oh, it’s you, Saul.”
“Hart, you old horse,” Saul boomed, shaking the tall man’s hand. “I’d like you to meet my new star, Grace Baron. Turns out she’s a fan of yours.”
“You don’t say,” Hart said, widening his eyes at her. He took her hand and pecked the back of it. “I’m always glad to meet a fan, and a new star of the screen no less.”
Grace’s face filled with blood and she smiled. Saul heaved a laugh.
“She’s still fresh. Once people see the new picture and she’s on the cover of Picture Play, you’ll be blushing to meet her.”
“I’m certain of it,” said Hart. To Grace, he said, “Tell me about it. The picture, I mean.”
“Well,” she began, “it’s…”
“Secret,” Saul cut in. “You’re just going to have to wait, pardner.”
“Heavens,” Hart said with a grin. “I’ll wager it’s a corker.”
“You’d win that bet.”
“Say, have I said much to you about my new picture? I’m doing it independently, you know.”
“And I wish you the very best of luck with it, Hart. Really, I do.” Saul patted the tall man condescendingly on the shoulder and took up Grace’s elbow once again. “Look, Gracie—there’s old Jack. Let’s say hello, shall we?”
Quickly he led her away, and as she went she craned her neck and said, “Nice meeting you, Mr. Hart.”
The fading cowboy nodded and drank, his face fallen and colorless. He looked like the grandfather of the star of The Scourge of Desert, though only eleven years had passed.
“Tumbleweeds,” Saul snickered as they approached Jack Parson, seated alone on a windowsill with his eyes on the band. Jack sucked at a cigarette and slouched so that his back curved.
“Not bad, these fellows,” he said absently. “I think I’ve seen the saxophonist in some clubs.”
“Who knows?” Saul said. “One looks the same as another to me. Say, Jackie, where’s your drink?”
“Don’t you know there’s an amendment against that sort of thing, Mr. Veritek?”
“The law’s against making and selling the stuff—there’s no law against drinking it. Hell, I’ll get something from that Oriental over there.” He gestured broadly at Manny, the bartender. “What’ll it be, old boy?”
Jack sighed. “Scotch, I suppose.”
“There’s a man’s drink,” Saul opined. “Pleased to see you’ve some balls left, Jackie.”
The fat man giggled and waddled back to the bar, sloshing his gin on the carpet.
“He’s even worse when he’s in his cups,” Jack said to Grace.
She sat down beside him on the windowsill and took his cigarette from him, drew deeply from it, and then handed it back.
“Saul’s all bark,” she said.
“Some dogs bark too much.”
“Maybe it’s what got him where he is.”
“That’s just fine,” Jack said with a pained expression. “If this picture doesn’t send him back from wherever the hell he came from.”
“Gee, you’re tough on that,” Grace said. She sipped her drink and crossed her long legs. Jack noticed. “I never heard of a director hating his own movie so bad.”
“Happens all the time. First time for me, though. And anymore I don’t think of the damned thing as mine. It’s all his.” He pointed his chin at the bar, where Saul was guzzling something brown and ogling a plump brunette. “So what’s your story, anyhow? Wait—let me guess. You’re from some no-name town in the middle of the country and you came out here with an aunt, only to be discovered in a department store.”
“It was vaudeville for me, actually, but the rest is pretty close. How did you get all that?”
“It’s a very old story, Ms. Baron. I think Scheherazade knew that one.”
“I guess she knew them all,” she said with a wry smile.
“All the good stories were already told before the Lumiére brothers filmed their first frames.”
Grace raised her eyebrows and sighed. She scanned the suite, glancing at red faces hovering above starched collars and gleaming necklaces, but none of them appeared to belong to Saul. A few she recognized from pictures she had seen, though the gin worked diligently at clouding her memory. The band laid into something slow and hypnotic and she closed her eyes for a moment, taking the music in. When she reopened them, Jack was rising to his feet.
“I don’t think Saul is coming back with that drink,” she said.
“It’s just as well. I’d rather be clearheaded for tomorrow’s scenes.”
“You may be the only one.”
He ran his fingers through his thick black hair and heaved a sigh.
“Good night, Grace,” he said. “Don’t let the devils here keep you from the devils tomorrow.”
With his head down and shoulders jutting forward, Jack went past the band and melted into the sweating throng. Grace watched him disappear and downed the rest of her drink while she pondered what he’d said. Something from Shakespeare buzzed in her head, half-remembered: All the devils are here.
She squinted at the glass in her hand, then went tipsily back to the bar for a fresh one.
5
L.A., 2013
I sipped at a mug of tepid black tea prepared and given to me by Barbara Tilitson. It was bitter and needed sugar, but I didn’t say anything about it. There was a squat guy with red hair bearing down on me where I sat, his necktie crooked and shirt spotted with sweat. Said his name was Shea, and that he was a police detective. I didn’t say much to him either, because he was a policeman and I didn’t have a lawyer present. That much I told him. He said I watched too much TV.
“You’re from Boston,” he said, droning as though he was bored. I agreed that I was. “Got a couple of parking tickets for you here in Hollywood, date back to the nineties.”
“I lived here for a year. Went back home.”
“To Boston.”
I sighed. “Yes.”
“All right. Explain to me again your relationship with Ms. Wheeler.”
“There wasn’t any relationship,” I said. “I never met her, not in person. She hired me over the phone to do a job out here. I was just showing up to work when I—when Ms. Tilitson and I—found the place like this.”
“And Ms. Wheeler. Like this.”
I said, “Yeah.”
A couple of blue shirts were tiptoeing around the place, wandering from room to room like they were thinking about renting it. Poor Leslie Wheeler remained where we found her, slumped dead in her chair. In the kitchen on the other side of me Barbara paced and wrung her hands. I wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take.
“Okay,” Shea said, rubbing the back of his neck and looking annoyed. “Let me go talk to Ms. Tilitson some more. Looks to me like you just stumbled onto a real bad scene, Woodard.”
“At least I already got paid up front,” I groused.
The detective gave me a sideways look.
“That right? You gonna keep that without doing anything for it?”
“No,” I said. “I plan on doing what I came here to do, actually.”
“I doubt that very much, Mr. Woodard,” Barbara said as she shuffled slowly into the room. Her eyes were red and swollen. “The reel is gone. Whoever killed Leslie must have taken it with them.”
“Reel?” Shea squeaked. “What kind of reel?”
Barbara and I locked glances. I reached for the pack in my pants pocket.
* * *
Between the two of us, Barbara and I told the policeman as much as we knew, starting with a primer on Angel of the Abyss, a few biographical details concerning Grace Baron fro
m me, and how Barbara and Leslie’s club got their hands on the reel. I then explained how I got roped into it, remembering along the way that I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure how I did. That was when the little redhead managed by some miracle of modern science to make my day even worse.
“We’ll want contact information for this Florence Sommer,” he said to Barbara. And then, to me: “And for your ex-wife, Mr. Woodard.”
“Do you have to drag her into this?” I whined. My voice rose a few octaves. I sounded like a petulant adolescent.
“She’s already in it, if she tipped Ms. Wheeler to your skills,” he said. “And like you said, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to bring a guy in from the East Coast to do something a hundred guys can do right here in Los Angeles.”
“She wanted to keep the whole thing under wraps,” I said. “This film really is a big hairy deal, Detective. Apart from the people in this room and a few others here in L.A., everybody else in the world thinks it’s lost—gone forever. Ms. Wheeler wanted to keep it that way for a while.”
“Awful secretive for an old movie,” he said.
Barbara snorted. “First of all, it’s not just some old movie. It’s a lost classic, a treasure. Secondly, Mr. Woodard—forgive me, Mr. Woodard—paints the thing like Leslie was trafficking in state secrets or something. It wasn’t like that at all. She just wanted to maintain control over this discovery until we had all of our ducks in a row. A thing like this will explode in a hurry, Detective Shea. You may not care much about it, but there a great many people who do. And there aren’t—weren’t—very many people with a greater knowledge of silent cinema than Leslie Wheeler.”
“I can believe people care a lot about this stuff,” the detective said sourly. “Looks a bit like Ms. Wheeler lost her life over it, doesn’t it?”
“God,” Barbara moaned. Her lips trembled and her face squashed up, palsied with anguish. “My God. Poor, poor Leslie.”