Groucho Marx, Private Eye

by Ron Goulart

  “About a block from here, a dismal little dump called the Scenario Bar and Grill.”

  “I know where it is, yes.”

  Very close to Jane’s ear, the widow said, “I’ll tell you what really killed Brian.” She touched her shoulder and returned to the front of the chapel.

  * * *

  The Elm Hotel was in downtown Los Angeles, a couple of rundown blocks from Pershing Square. While Groucho was skipping lunch and Jane was attending the funeral, I was checking with an old informant from my LA Times days.

  The small lobby of the five-story Elm had green linoleum on the floor. There was a very old sofa, three chunky armchairs, two sand ashtrays, and three floor lamps with sailboats in the sunset shades. I had two similar lamps in my furnished cottage and when I saw these, I had a brief vision of a vast factory somewhere with sailboats in the sunset shades rolling along on huge conveyor belts.

  The lobby had recently been sprayed for bugs and that smell partially masked the older odors of stale food, dead cigarettes, and bad plumbing.

  A fat man wearing ragged tweed slacks and a faded USC sweatshirt was dozing in one of the chairs. A copy of The Saturday Review of Literature lay steepled on the linoleum just below his dangling left hand.

  A plump orange cat was sprawled on the arm of the sofa and he growled at me and swatted at the air as I headed by him toward the desk.

  No clerk was on duty. On the countertop a long line of ants was marching toward an abandoned coffee cup.

  The single elevator didn’t inspire confidence, so I decided to climb the two floors to Tim O’Hearn’s room.

  The stairways weren’t carpeted either, but they also lacked linoleum. The odors were about the same as down in the lobby except there wasn’t any bug spray to hide them.

  Somebody had been sick about five feet short of my informant’s door. I skirted that, continued on, and then stopped and knocked on 213.

  From inside the room organ music welled up and Harry Whitechurch’s voice, more somber than it was on our radio show, said, “And now it’s time for The Search for Love, the true-life story of a young widow’s courageous quest for happiness. Brought to you today and every day by Bascom’s One-Hundred-Percent Soap. If you want pure soap, then—” The radio suddenly died.

  “Yeah?” inquired O’Hearn on the other side of the room’s thin door.

  “It’s Frank.”

  The door opened a few inches and a thin, faded man of about fifty squinted out at me. “Oh, yeah, hi, Frank.” O’Hearn had a brown bottle of Lucky Lager Beer in his hand. “Come on in, but excuse the looks of the place. I split up with Agnes, you know, and this new dump lacks a woman’s touch.”

  All the shades were down and a small electric heater glowed in front of the wide door that hid the wall bed. There was one armchair and it was piled high with movie trade journals, racing forms, and tip sheets. About a half dozen paper plates were scattered around, sitting on the linoleum, resting on the bureau, shoved behind the chair. The plates held the remnants of cheese sandwiches that were splotched with mold of varying hues.

  “My temperature is all screwed up.” O’Hearn seated himself in one of the two metal folding chairs his room possessed. “That’s why I got the damn heater going full blast. I’m going to have to talk to a doctor, find out how low your temperature can drop before you’re just simply dead and done for.”

  “What’s your temperature now?”

  “I can’t exactly tell because I broke my thermometer about three weeks ago.” He nodded at the other folding chair.

  I sat, facing him. “What have you found out, Tim?”

  “Fifteen bucks worth.”

  “Too much,” I told him, noticing that there was another decaying cheese sandwich beneath my chair.

  “There’s this recession going on.” He paused to drink from the beer bottle. “Besides, Frank, gathering the kind of info you want is extremely risky.”

  “Ten bucks.”

  “Twelve.”

  “Nope, ten or I go drop in on Terry Wollter.”

  “That stumblebum? He doesn’t even know which end to put his hat on.” O’Hearn sampled the Lucky Lager once more. “All right, since we’re old pals. Make it ten bucks.”

  I nodded. “Okay, fine. Now what about—”

  “I need the ten up front, Frank.”

  I took a five-dollar bill out of my wallet, handed it to him. “Five in front.”

  Muttering, he leaned and snatched the money. “First, I’ll give you some advice for free,” he said, crumpling the bill and stuffing it in the pocket of his coat sweater. “Even other guys in the Combination are leery of Tartaglia. He’s, you know, like Bugsy Siegel. Crazy and mean.”

  “What about Jack Cortez?”

  O’Hearn tilted his head to the left and twisted his lips. “Not as nutty as Tartaglia, but a nasty son of a bitch. He isn’t somebody you want to annoy, Frank.”

  “Be that as it may, what have you found out?”

  O’Hearn finished the beer and set the empty bottle on the floor near a lineup of other empty bottles. “Dr. Benninger was doing business with Tartaglia,” he said. “Jack Cortez was the guy he actually dealt with directly, the one who supplied him with what he needed and the one he paid off to.”

  “Did they have anything to do with Benninger’s getting killed?”

  “I’m working up to that angle,” my informant answered. “What I’m hearing—and keep in mind I have to be damn careful how I nose around on this, Frank—the word I’m getting is that the doctor was pretty upset about something maybe three four days before he got bumped off.”

  “About what?”

  O’Hearn frowned. “I think Jack Cortez was pressuring him to do them some kind of favor.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’m trying to find out.”

  “Suppose he refused to do what they wanted—would they kill him over that?”

  “Hell, Tartaglia would have you killed if you sang ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ off-key,” answered O’Hearn. “Lots of times he’d kill you for no reason at all. I told you, the guy’s nuts.”

  I inched my chair closer to his. “How about Frances London? Who set her up?”

  “The consensus is she didn’t have anything to do with killing Benninger.”

  “That’s our opinion, too, Tim,” I reminded him. “What I’m paying you for is some details we can use to help her.”

  “Not much yet on that,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Are Tartaglia and Jack Cortez tied in with framing her?”

  Getting up, O’Hearn scanned his room. “I had another bottle of beer someplace,” he said, starting to search.

  “Who framed her?” I asked him.

  “Well, I did hear one thing, but I’m not sure if you can put much faith in it, Frank.” Down on his knees, he was sweeping a hand along under the bureau. “She’s got an agent, doesn’t she?”

  “Yeah, it’s a guy named Nate Winston.”

  “You should maybe talk to him.” He made a chuckling noise and stood up clutching a bottle of warm beer. “Now we have to find the church key.”

  I left my chair. “What about Winston?”

  “Her agent?” He shrugged. “There’s a possibility he’s not exactly kosher.” He spotted a bottle opener atop the bureau next to a battered Betty Boop doll. “That’s all I heard about him.”

  I gave him another five-dollar bill. “I’ll talk to you again tomorrow, Tim.”

  He nodded as he pried the bottle cap off. “Okay, but let’s all be circumspect about this, huh? I really don’t want to annoy Tartaglia or anybody who works for him.”

  “We share that goal,” I assured him and left his room.

  A block and a half from the hotel, I found a telephone booth that somebody hadn’t been sick in. Stepping in, I dropped my nickel and called the office of Frances London’s agent.

  “Hollywoodland Answering Services,” answered a young woman after the second ring.

  “
I want to get in touch with Nate Winston.”

  “You and a heck of a lot of other people, including three bill collectors and a couple ex-wives.”

  “I’m with MGM,” I lied, “and we’re very interested in one of his clients.”

  “Boy, there’s something you don’t hear often. MGM interested in anybody that bum represents,” she said. “Well, you’re out of luck.”

  “And why is that?”

  “He seems to have skipped town,” said the answering service operator. “Nobody around here knows where the heck the guy is and he sure didn’t tell us. Some people think he’s maybe in Mexico, others favor Canada. Me, I have no opinion.”

  “Well, if he does contact you, tell him to get in touch with Louis B. Mayer.”

  “Sure thing,” she said, laughing and breaking the connection.

  Fourteen

  The only other patron in the shadowy, early afternoon Scenario Bar & Grill was a sad, pale man who might’ve been F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  He looked up briefly from his drink when Jane and Dianne Sayler came in, then returned his attention to the envelope he’d been scribbling on with a fat black fountain pen.

  Jane said to her friend, “We’ve got some privacy now. Explain what you meant about how Brian really died.”

  “I have to lead up to that. Let’s sit down and get a drink first.” Dianne led her over to a booth. “The Scenario is basically a dump,” she said, sitting. “And they keep it so air-conditioned that icicles tend to form on your butt, but it’s close to the cemetery.”

  “I suppose they cater to the after-funeral crowd.”

  Her friend asked, “What’ll you have?”

  “Just a glass of seltzer.”

  The artist waved in the direction of the husky redheaded bartender. “Rudy,” she called, “the usual and a plain soda.”

  The big freckled man waved back, nodding. “Long time no see, kid,” he said. “On the wagon were you?”

  “No, simply hitting a better class of saloon.” She leaned back against the dark-paneled wall of their booth.

  “That’s what I like about this town,” observed Rudy. “Everybody is a wiseass, if you’ll pardon my French.”

  Jane unfastened her hat. “I hate these things,” she said, taking it off and setting it on the table.

  “I’m glad you showed up for the funeral, Janey.”

  “You’re the only one who calls me that anymore.”

  “I won’t if you’d prefer Jane.”

  “No, it’s fine. Reminds me of my innocent school girl days.”

  “I’d have to go back even further than that to dredge up any memories of my innocent days.” She frowned at the bartender as he delivered their drinks. “Still the slowest service in Hollywood, I notice.”

  Rudy chuckled. “How come I never see your pictures in the Saturday Evening Post?”

  “Because I work for Collier’s and the Post won’t use anyone who works for them.”

  “So that’s why I never spot any of Norman Rockwell’s stuff in Collier’s.”

  “Right, exactly, it’s a conspiracy and I’m thinking about staging a sit-down strike.”

  “Naw, you don’t want to go all the way back to Philly just to sit down. It’s a dull town. Way I see it, you—”

  “Rudy, you can go away now,” suggested Dianne.

  “Okay, I don’t want to outwear my welcome.” He headed back for the bar.

  “He really babbles a lot.” Dianne picked up her Tom Collins.

  Jane said, “You ready to talk now?”

  After glancing over at Rudy and then the pale man who was probably F. Scott Fitzgerald, her friend said, “Your boyfriend—Fred Denby, isn’t it?”

  “Frank Denby.”

  “I heard he was some kind of detective—Oh, by the way, what’s the guy look like? Tall and handsome?”

  “Middle-size and passable, but I love him,” answered Jane. “He’s actually a radio writer, Dianne, but he does some amateur detective work now and then. He and—”

  “He and Groucho Marx. Yes, that was in all the papers last fall.”

  “Right now they’re looking into the murder of that plastic surgeon, Dr. Benninger who—”

  “That’s funny.” The artist had been reaching for her drink, but she stopped, frowning.

  “In what way?”

  Dianne answered, “I’ll get to that, Janey, but let me backtrack a little first.” She drank about half her drink. “I never talked much about my reasons for splitting with Brian. It isn’t the sort of thing I wanted to see in columns. He was—and it had been going on for at least a year before I decided that I couldn’t help him and he wasn’t going to help himself—Anyway, Brian was pretty seriously involved with heroin.”

  “Is that where Dr. Benninger fits in?”

  Dianne blinked. “How’d you know that?”

  “Something Frank found out. The doctor was supplying drugs to some of his patients.”

  “Yes, Brian was one of them,” she said. “It fouled up our marriage but, so far it hadn’t much screwed up his career.”

  “Did anyone at Paragon know about his problem?”

  “Sure, the Zansky Brothers and their chief troubleshooter, a guy named Tad Ballard,” answered Dianne. “Probably a few others. Every damn one of those costume epics Brian starred in made money for Paragon, so they put up with his habit and covered for him.” She finished her Tom Collins. “Keep in mind, Janey, that none of them tried to get him off heroin. They just made damn sure he stayed in good enough shape to get in front of the cameras.” She waved again at the bartender. “You may not keep up with crap like this, but Brian’s been on the list of the top ten box-office draws for the past three years—ever since he made The Sword of Charlemagne. An actor with that much pull, you treat very well and you overlook his weaknesses.”

  Rudy brought over a fresh Tom Collins. “I just realized why you’re wearing black,” he said to Dianne. “Your husband died and today was his funeral. Sorry I didn’t think of that earlier. This one’s on the house, kid.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “But he was on his way to being my former husband.”

  “Sorry anyway.” He went away.

  Jane poked at an ice cube that was floating at the top of her glass of seltzer. It went sinking to the bottom and then bobbed up again. “Brian didn’t actually die of a heart attack, did he?”

  “No, he didn’t.” She seemed to be having a little trouble breathing. After grabbing hold of the edge of the table with both hands, she took a slow deep breath in and out. “Brian’s valet found him sprawled on the floor in his den when he came home after his night off. That’s Edwin, a very savvy Hollywood servant. He realized that Brian had died from a heroin overdose—hell, the needle was still sticking in his backside. Anyway, Edwin didn’t call Brian’s doctor or the police.”

  “He telephoned this Tad Ballard, the Paragon trouble-shooter?”

  “That’s right, Janey, yes. Ballard’s by way of being a sort of garbage man, an expert at cleaning up messes,” Dianne said after starting on her second drink. “He went over Brian’s mansion, got rid of all the drug paraphernalia. Then he called in a physician who’s on their payroll, a guy who helps them cover up the occasional suicide, drug accident, or bad case of wife beating.” She leaned back again. “And that’s how Brian came to die of a heart attack.”

  “How’d you find out what really went on?”

  “Edwin dropped by early the next day,” she replied. “He knew I probably wouldn’t tell anyone or make a fuss. ‘I simply thought, mum, that you’d like to know. Seeing as how you were once close to him.’”

  Jane asked, “Do you want me to suggest to Frank that he look into this?”

  “I haven’t yet come to the part I’ve been really brooding about,” Dianne said. “About two weeks ago Brian telephoned me—for the first time in months. He didn’t sound all that well and he told me he’d decided, as soon as the shooting on The Legend of King Arthur was over, to check
himself into a sanitarium and take a cure.”

  “He’d tried that before, hadn’t he?”

  The artist held up two fingers. “Twice, but the cures didn’t take and he went back on the stuff,” she said. “This time, though, he swore he was going to make it.”

  “If you came back and stuck with him through the ordeal?”

  She nodded. “That was it, but I’d been through all that crap before and I told Brian so,” Dianne said. “But then last week he called me again. He said he’d figured out a way to guarantee he’d stay off drugs. What he intended to do was go to the newspapers and publicly admit his habit. He was also planning to accuse Benninger and that bastard, Jack Cortez, of running a dope business that catered to show people.”

  “That wasn’t smart.”

  “It wasn’t, no, and I told him that.” She tried her drink again. “Brian was a very frugal man and he’d invested in real estate for years. He wasn’t really worried if his career in movies was ruined by his public confession. And he had the notion that he could buy extra protection for himself and keep Cortez from hurting him.”

  “But maybe they found out about what Brian was intending to do,” Jane suggested. “Do you think Cortez might have had something to do with his death?”

  Dianne said quietly, “That’s what I want you to talk to your boyfriend about.”

  Fifteen

  By sundown the rain had turned to mist and the stretch of Hollywood we were driving through had a fuzzy gray look. The windshield wipers of my yellow Plymouth coupé were making that odd keening noise they sometimes made on foggy nights.

  “Once we get settled into our new digs,” I said to Jane, “I’m seriously going to consider buying a new car. Not a brand-new car, but one that’s somewhat newer than this one.”

  She’d been turned in the passenger seat, eyes slightly narrowed, looking again out the back window. “Hum?” she said.

  “Hey, nobody’s following us.”

  Sighting, she faced forward. “We disagree,” she said quietly. “But I know darned well a huge black Pontiac has been trailing us off and on from the time you picked me up at my place.”

  Nodding at the rearview mirror, I said, “I’ve been checking that ever since you first mentioned it. I haven’t noticed a damn thing.”