by Ron Goulart
“No,” Groucho assured me, “I intend to depend entirely on divine inspiration.”
Seventeen
Wearing white tennis togs and looking, in his opinion, quite virile, Groucho went trotting into his den at a few minutes after ten the next morning. Tucking his racket up under his arm, he rested his backside on the edge of his desk and picked up the phone.
He gave the operator a number and a moment later was talking to his brother Zeppo. “I’d like, Herbert, some information about … What do you mean that wasn’t a cordial brotherly greeting?… Well, perhaps I could’ve opened with something like ‘Hail to thee, O beloved brother,’ but … No, I don’t address Harpo as palsy-walsy. Who told you that I … Listen, Zeppo, I have a tennis date with Chaplin, so my time is … Well, Charlie Chaplin … No, I don’t know whatever happened to Syd Chaplin. He was certainly very fetching in Charley’s Aunt, but since it’s his brother I’m about to face on the courts, I … No, I’m not lording the fact that I’m off to play tennis with Charlie Chaplin over you. Nor am I bragging about it … Well, when one of the world’s best-loved comedians wants to play tennis, naturally he wants to be evenly matched. Therefore, he picked another beloved comic for an opponent and … I’m not implying that nobody loves you, Zeppo. Listen now. Do you remember that blond girl who looks like Frances London and has a singular pair of tsitskes? She was eager to have you represent her, this was about a year back and … Ah, right. That’s her. Maggie Barnes. Do you know where I can find her and … No, I’m not contemplating adultery. Well, wait. I might be contemplating adultery—In fact, you could say that contemplating adultery has become one of my favorite hobbies of late and may even replace stamp collecting and making tie racks with my wood burning set as my favorite most pastime—but I am not contemplating adultery with Maggie Barnes. This has to do with a murder case I find myself working on. So if … How can I be getting senile at forty?… Okay, how can I be getting senile at forty-seven? Detecting is not a sign of mental decline. Being a crackerjack sleuth, I am obliged to solve a case now and then. It’s my civic duty. So who represents Maggie Barnes?… Which goniff, Zeppo?… Rupe McClosky. I thought he only booked chimpanzees and trained fleas … Oh, he’s trying to improve his image by adding bimbos like Maggie Barnes to his roster. Well, palsy-walsy, I appreciate your … No, I’m not being snide. I was simply expressing the bottled up feelings of fraternal devotion I have for you, my kid brother … Yes, I will say hello to Chaplin for you. Though I don’t honestly believe he’s looking for an agent. And now I must be going, Zep. Farewell.”
He hung up, shifted his grip on his tennis racket, and went bounding out of the room.
Had he not tripped over a throw rug in the hall, it would’ve been a perfect exit.
* * *
The uniformed guard came out of the gatehouse that sat just to the right of the entrance to the private Malibu community I was visiting. He was large, wide, and tanned. “What’s the name again?” He lifted his dark glasses to scan again the list of names on his clipboard.
“Frank Denby,” I repeated, leaning my head out of the open window of my yellow coupé. “I have an appointment with Elena Stanton.”
He moved a thick forefinger slowly along the list. “Could you be Fred Dimby?”
“What’s it pay?”
He frowned at me briefly. “I mean, could that pinheaded swish who lives with her and off her have given me your name incorrectly? I’ve got a Fred Dimby down here to call on Miss Stanton at eleven o’clock.”
“Yeah, that must be me.”
“Your name’s familiar.” He made a check mark on the list, reached into the gatehouse, and tossed the clipboard onto his small desk.
“Which name?”
“Frank Denby. You connected with show business?”
“I write a radio show called Groucho Marx, Private Eye. Maybe you—”
“Can’t stand the Marx Brothers.” The guard gave a negative shake of his head. “I’ll tell you who’s funny, though. This guy Bob Hope. Have you seen The Big Broadcast of 1938 yet?”
“Last week, sure. Hope is funny but not as funny as Groucho.”
“He’s funnier and he can sing.”
“So can Groucho.”
“Well, I never heard of your radio show, so I must know your name from someplace else.” He thought for a moment. “LA Times. You wrote for them.”
“Five years’ worth.”
“I read a lot of your stories.” He stepped back into the gatehouse. “Hold on and I’ll get the gate out of your way, Frank.” He poked a button on a control panel.
The high wrought iron gates buzzed and rattled before slowly swinging inward.
“She lives in the big God-awful pink house on Lagunitas Way,” he said.
I gave him a casual salute and drove on through the open gateway.
There were twenty-some homes scattered across the twenty-some acres inside the walls of this private community. Most of them were large and in Spanish or Moroccan style, with red tile roofs, cream-colored stucco exteriors, and quite a lot of black wrought iron trim. There were lots of palm trees, tropical plants and flowers, big stretches of bright green lawn. I thought I saw a peacock unfurling its tail amid the shrubbery, but I wasn’t certain.
As I pulled into the drive of the former actress’ sprawling pink house, a tall red-haired young woman, wearing a two-piece green swimsuit under a wide open white terry cloth robe, came striding across the splendid lawn of the mission-style house next door. She gave my car a brief glance that could best be described as disdainful, crossed the street, and started down the twisting wooden stairway that led to a wide stretch of private beach.
Today was sunny, though somewhat hazy, and a slightly fishy scent was drifting in from the Pacific Ocean on the warm late-morning wind.
“Are you Fred Dimby?” A very handsome man in white duck trousers and a crimson polo shirt had opened the wide redwood door of Elena Stanton’s house while I was still several red tile steps from it.
“Frank Denby,” I corrected, stopping just short of the fuzzy welcome mat.
“Close enough. C’mon in.” He was tall, muscular in a life guard sort of way, and his shaggy hair was sun-bleached blond. “You recognize me, huh?”
“No.” I stepped into the large hallway. The mosaic tile floor was turquoise, gold, and a sort of sandy red. “Actor?”
“Sure, I’m Gary LeMay.”
“Not the Gary LeMay?”
“I’m not the kind of guy you maybe want to get too funny with, Denby,” he advised. “Most recently I had a good part in Ty-Gor’s Hidden Treasure.”
“Friend of mine was in that, too. Enery McBride.”
“The colored boy,” said the blond actor. “He’s okay. Knows his place.”
“Might I see Miss Stanton now?”
He leaned close to me. “She’s had a very rough time,” he told me. “Don’t say anything to upset her, okay?”
“I’ll sure try not to,” I assured him. “But I do want to ask about Dr. Benninger, as I mentioned to her on the phone this morning.”
“That son of a bitch,” LeMay said. “You’re not trying to find out who killed him, are you?”
“Nope, who didn’t kill him.”
“Then you must be trying to help Frances London.”
“I am, along with Groucho Marx.”
He said, “I worked on a quickie B movie with Frances once. Frisco Female. She’s a very nice lady. You ever catch it?”
“Sure, Chester Morris was in that one.”
“I played the gangster who gets tossed in the Bay in a bucket of cement.”
“A memorable performance.”
“I was pretty good in it,” he said, starting away along the hall. “Let’s go talk to Elena.”
* * *
I felt as though I’d wandered into a chapter of a Republic Pictures serial, that I was imprisoned in the lair of some mysterious phantom. The living room had a shadowy underground feel to it. The full-length windo
ws, all five of them were masked by thick, dark drapes and the only light came from the weak table lamp next to the deep armchair LeMay had escorted me to.
There were a lot of plants. Large wooden tubs held stunted palms, there were big coppery vases with overflowing ferns, spiky cactus and several things I couldn’t identify but that looked like dwarf weeping willows. The room was chill and damp, smelling strongly of loamy earth.
Elena Stanton was in a high-backed white wicker chair. A thin woman, she sat very stiff and straight, wearing a long black dress. She also had a black scarf wound around so that it covered the lower half of her face. Her eyes were hidden by tinted glasses.
The blond actor was crouched on a gray hassock close by, holding her knobby right hand in both of his.
“I’m glad he’s dead,” she said in her pale, muffled voice. “I had nothing, however, to do with Benninger’s death.”
I leaned forward, thinking that it would help me hear her better. “Do you know any of his other patients? Anyone who ended up with a problem or a reason to hate the guy?”
The black scarf fluttered, very faintly, when she spoke. “He made several other mistakes besides mine. But I…” Her voice faded, the scarf grew still.
LeMay scowled at me. “She won’t give you any of their names,” he told me. “If any of that bastard’s victims did kill him, she believes they were more than justified.”
“You knew Frances London,” I said to her. “Fact is, you made a picture together in 1933—Midnight at the Castle.”
“You remember seeing that?”
I admitted, “No, I never saw it. Just before coming over here I looked up your credits in a Film Daily Year Book.”
“It was a nice picture,” she said.
“A big hit at the box office, too,” added LeMay.
“The point I’m trying to make is that you knew Frances London and, hopefully, you liked her.”
“I did, very much. Although I haven’t seen her for years.”
“She doesn’t see many people anymore,” put in the actor.
“We’re trying to establish that she didn’t have a damn thing to do with Dr. Benninger’s death. To prove even a reasonable doubt, well, we need to have somebody else to suggest as the killer. We—that’s Groucho Marx and I—don’t want to frame anyone or cause them trouble, but if—”
“I can’t help you with that,” she told me. “But I invited you here because I do have something to tell you that may help poor Frances.”
“Okay, fine.” I leaned further forward.
“Benninger was more than just a plastic surgeon,” she said. “He also supplied narcotics to quite a few Hollywood people.”
I sat back. “We already knew that,” I said. “Most of his stock was supplied by the outfit run by a guy named Tartaglia.”
“And Jack Cortez,” she added. “I met Cortez once when I was at a party with Benninger. A very attractive man, who hid his innate nastiness quite well.”
“You don’t need to tell him anything more.” LeMay tightened his hold on her hand while giving me an unhappy scowl.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Talking about that period doesn’t bother me, Gary.” She paused, resting her head back against the high white wicker chair. “What Benninger did with some of the narcotics he handled—as he did in my case—what he did was provide painkillers to anyone who’d had an unfortunate accident while under his knife. After he ruined my face, there was considerable pain and, as you can imagine, much depression. He—”
“You should’ve sued the bastard,” said LeMay, angry.
“I couldn’t do that,” she said quietly. “I was still a fairly successful actress then and I was hoping … Well, while Benninger was holding out hope that my face could be saved, he provided me with drugs to get me over the pain and the depression. Morphine, I found, works very well with pain and—”
“That’s enough, Elena.” Still holding her hand, LeMay stood up. “It hurts me when you talk about this stuff.”
She got her hand away from him, patted his wrist gently. “It doesn’t bother me,” she assured him. To me she added, “It’s my opinion, Mr. Denby, that Benninger’s death had something to do with his involvement with people like Jack Cortez.”
I rose. “Thanks for talking to me.”
“I hope you get a chance sometime to see Midnight at the Castle,” she said. “I was very pretty then.”
“You were beautiful,” said LeMay.
I left them there in the shadows.
Eighteen
The tourists, two of them, closed in on Groucho, as he later told me, a moment or so after he’d stepped out of his Cadillac onto the early afternoon sidewalk in the heart of Pasadena.
He was strolling along, unwrapping a fresh cigar, when the woman wobbled into his path. She was a large middle-aged lady in a print dress and she was carrying an autograph book. Her husband, a tall narrow man in a pale blue seersucker suit, lagged a few feet to the rear.
To avoid colliding with her, Groucho stopped dead, rose up on his toes, and took a hop backward. “Madam?”
“I think you’re Groucho Marx,” she explained, sounding nervous, “but my husband says you’re somebody else.”
He slipped the unwrapped cigar into the outer vest pocket of his jacket. “Actually, you’re both right,” he said, accepting the autograph album. “For many years I was Groucho Marx, but I eventually grew dreadfully tired of that. For over a month now I’ve been Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Truth to tell, madam, that’s even less gratifying and I’m seriously considering becoming Tess of the Brown d’Urbervilles.”
Perplexed, the woman watched him scribbling on a page of the fat book.
“And now I must continue on my appointed rounds.” He returned the album, scooted around her, and moved off along the sidewalk.
After inspecting the inscription, she turned to him. “Merle, he went and signed it Thomas Hardy.”
“I told you it wasn’t Groucho Marx.”
Groucho walked to the middle of the block, slowed, then halted entirely. None of the buildings, neither the small shops nor the low office buildings, bore the address he was seeking. In the place where Maggie Barnes’s agent ought to have his office, there was a narrow, rundown miniature golf course. The greens were overgrown and weedy, all the little windmills and arched bridges were faded and weather-beaten. The low picket fence that surrounded the Pee Wee Heaven Golf Park had numerous gaps and the swinging gate lay on its side at the edge of the gravel pathway. Two fat men, the only customers, were at the eleventh hole arguing.
There was a small gingerbread-covered cottage just inside the woebegone fence. “This must be the place where Hansel and Gretel moved after they retired,” decided Groucho, entering the golf course and approaching the cottage.
When he knocked on the door, several more flakes of brittle yellow paint fell free and fluttered to the dry, balding doormat.
“Twenty-five cents,” said the heavyset bald man who opened the door and handed a scorecard out to Groucho. “We’re not too busy this afternoon and you can play right through, pal.”
“It’s tempting, since I do dearly love outdoor sports,” said Groucho, taking out his cigar again. “But what I’m really seeking is Rupe McCloskey, the illustrious talent impresario. Can you direct me to his—”
“Hey, you’re Groucho Marx.” He snatched the scorecard back, tossed it away and shook Groucho’s hand. “What sort of talent are you looking for, Groucho? I’ll bet you need a leading lady for your next film. Come on in and we’ll go through my book of star-caliber dames, I think I’ve got just the gal for Room Service.”
“Alas, if only I’d known.” Groucho slouched across the threshold. “As it is we’re going to have to make do with Lucille Ball.”
“An amateur, though her gams aren’t bad. We can—watch your noggin, Groucho.”
The ceiling was extremely low and Groucho had to duck down to avoid banging his head against one of the beams. “You run an i
ntriguing business here, McCloskey,” he told him. “It isn’t every man who’d be shrewd enough to combine peewee golf with talent agenting.”
“I’ll be honest with you, Groucho.” Hunched low, the agent walked over to his small desk and hunkered down behind it. “I got into miniature golf a bit late. Few years earlier a place like this would’ve done a land office business.”
“Yes, that was about the same period when land offices were doing peewee golf business and pancakes were selling like hot-cakes and all was right with the world except for a few isolated trouble spots in far-off Europe.” He eyed the low ceiling and settled into a wooden chair that faced the agent’s desk. “Didn’t your offspring get mad when you borrowed their playhouse to use for your office.”
“I’ll be honest with you, pal,” said McCloskey. “The people I bought this joint from were small.”
Groucho lit his cigar, took a few puffs. “I’m looking for Maggie Barnes,” he said, exhaling smoke.
“Maggie Barnes,” said the agent. “Maggie Barnes. Nope, I can’t place the name, Groucho.”
“Sure you can, Rupe. You wouldn’t want burly policemen with rubber hoses to have to come around asking you about her, would you?”
“What the hell’s she done now?”
“How’s extortion sound?”
“She tried to extort money from you?”
“No, but I would like to know how extortion sounds, McCloskey. I’m thinking of naming my new cat that.” Groucho hunched, watching the agent’s plump face. “I know that you do indeed represent the young lady. I also suspect that she’s up to no good. On top of which, she might be able to supply me with some information.”
McCloskey said, “I get it, Groucho. This is more of that amateur detective crap.” He shook his head. “Let me tell you something, pal. You did okay on that Peg McMorrow mess, but you ought to rest on your laurels.”
“I tried that, but it was very uncomfortable. Few people realize that laurels are extremely prickly,” he said. “I’d like her address, Rupe.”
“Maggie isn’t acting anymore.”