by Eve Goldberg
We turned off the coast highway, wound up Sunset through the Palisades, turned onto Joey’s street. As we pulled up to the curb at Joey’s house, the front door flung open. Cora Flynn stood motionless in the doorway. Her eyes landed on Joey, then her head swiveled sideways towards the house. Something was wrong.
CHAPTER 9
She could have been just a mother hurrying, eager to re-unite with her son. But something was off. She stumbled on the stone path that ran alongside the reflecting pond and nearly fell.
Joey jumped out of the car and rushed towards his mother. I watched from the car as they embraced. Mrs. Flynn held onto Joey. After a few seconds, he squirmed to get away. I got out of the car and walked towards them. Up close, I saw that Mrs. Flynn’s face was a mess: mascara ran down her cheeks, and her eyes were red. I smelled booze on her breath.
“Somebody’s broken in,” she said.
“What?” I looked towards the house. The curtains were drawn across the windows.
“What happened, Mom?” Joey’s eyes were wide with alarm.
“I . . . I just got home a while ago. I tried to clean up. I really did. I didn’t want you coming home to this, baby . . . but it’s . . . it’s hopeless.”
“Stay right there,” I said, moving past them. Mrs. Flynn froze. But Joey started to follow me.
“Stay with your mother, Joey,” I commanded. “Wait here until I come back out.”
I went inside the house. The place was trashed. Shelves were emptied out, books and record albums tossed onto the floor, drawers pulled opened, papers strewn about. I made a quick search of the house, going room to room. No room had been spared. In the bathroom, heaped on the floor was a jumble of towels and pill bottles, soaps and lotions and lipsticks. In all three bedrooms, sheets and blankets had been ripped off the beds, mattresses overturned, clothes piled on the floor. Joey’s 45s had been pulled out of their covers and tossed onto his overturned mattress. In the kitchen, the cabinets hung open and the floor was a clutter of broken dishes and utensils. The Lucky Charms cereal box was ripped to shreds.
I went back outside and found Joey and his mother standing together by the front door. Mrs. Flynn’s hand was resting on Joey’s shoulder. I wasn’t sure if she was holding him back, or using him for support.
“Can we come in now?” she asked.
“Might as well. The dining area’s about the only place that’s not trashed. But try to touch as little as possible. The police might want to dust for prints.”
Mrs. Flynn shot me a look. The NO POLICE look.
The three of us sat at the teak dining table where I had a direct view of the ransacked living room. Joey was wide-eyed, checking everything out. Mrs. Flynn chose the seat facing the wall. She reached for a cigarette. Her hands were shaking.
“I feel horrible,” she said. “It’s like we’ve been invaded.”
“Can I see my room?” Joey asked, looking at me.
“In a while,” I said, then turned to Mrs. Flynn. “You haven’t called the police yet?”
“No. I . . . I’d rather not. I mean what’s done is done, right? What can the police do about it now?”
“Probably nothing. But now and then they do nab a bad guy or two.”
“Dad doesn’t like cops,” Joey said.
“There you go,” Mrs. Flynn said, as if this closed the discussion.
I didn’t know what to do or say next. My brain felt locked up and fuzzy at the same time. But like it or not, Joey and his mother were depending on me right now. I pictured the ocean on a calm day, low rollers under a grey sky. My brain started to unlock. I turned to Mrs. Flynn.
“Have you noticed anything missing?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t looked real closely. Everything is such as mess.”
“Do you keep cash in the house?”
“Only what’s in my purse. And a few dollars for Joey, in case of emergency.” She turned to her son. “But you took that the other night, didn’t you?”
Joey nodded with a hangdog expression.
“What about jewelry?” I said.
“I don’t know. I was trying to clean up.”
From what I could tell, she had been doing more drinking than cleaning up.
“I’d like you to go check and see if anything’s been stolen,” I said. “Cash or jewelry or medication. Anything.”
“Now?”
“Yes. I’ll stay here with Joey.”
Mrs. Flynn stood up and walked down the hall. When she was out of sight, Joey turned to me.
“Is it my fault?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I hadn’t run away . . . I mean summer vacation started today and maybe . . . if I’d been home . . . ” Joey trailed off. He looked down at his hands.
“Hey, listen up. This is not your fault. None of it. You’re just a kid. All this is grown-up stuff.”
Joey shrugged. A few words from me wasn’t going to change how he felt.
When Mrs. Flynn returned, she was carrying a pink satin-lined box. The lid was hanging open from a single hinge like a loose tooth. Inside was a tangled mass of jewelry.
“It was all on the floor,” she said. “I’m not positive, but I don’t think anything is missing. I don’t have any real expensive pieces anyway.”
Joey turned to me. “Can I go to my room now?”
“Okay, let’s check it out.”
I walked with Joey to his room. We stopped at the threshold and took in the mayhem. Joey stood very still. His face was blank.
“I’ll clean it up,” he said.
I helped him put the mattress back on its box springs, then left him to the rest. By the time I returned to the dining area, Mrs. Flynn had miraculously found an unbroken glass and was pouring herself some scotch. I sat down across from her.
I said, “You know this wasn’t a robbery, right?”
She nodded, lit a cigarette, and took a long drag.
“Mrs. Flynn, I’m not sure what’s going on here, and it seems like you don’t want to tell me, but doesn’t it bother you that whatever is happening, you and your son may be in danger?”
“We’ll be fine.”
“I think you should call the police.”
“No police. I already told you.” She shook her head, but the back and forth went on a bit too long, and her head starting to droop.
“Then what are you going to do?” I said.
“Look, you found Joey and I’m truly grateful for that. But I can handle my own life from here.”
It sounded like a speech from a B-movie, but she had a point. How was this any of my business? I had accomplished the job she hired me for. I should pat myself on the back: Good job, Ryan. I should cruise over to the VA and describe the whole crazy thing to Lou. I should get some sleep, wax my board, and hit the waves in the morning.
I should have been stoked to be done with the case. I should have just shut up and gone home.
“Sometimes it’s hard to handle things all by ourselves,” I said instead.
“Are you insinuating that I can’t take care of my own life?” Her eyes flashed with anger. She stood up and rummaged through her purse. “What do I owe you? I’ll write you a check.”
“Please, Mrs. Flynn. Sit down. I didn’t mean anything.”
“Now you’re being plain dishonest.”
She was right.
Neither of us said anything for a while. A car engine started up somewhere nearby. A dog barked.
“We’re fine,” Mrs. Flynn said. “Okay? I appreciate your concern, but Joey and I are fine.”
“Alright. One question though. Where’s the black rug?”
She jerked her body around to face the living room.
“Well, I . . . .I don’t know.” She walked to the top of the three steps which led down the sunken living room. “Where is it?”
“You didn’t do something with it? Take it to the dry cleaners or something?”
“No,” she said adamantly. “What are you talking about?
Where is the rug!”
“I think all this has something to do with the photos.”
“Photos?”
Lou always emphasized how important it is to watch people’s faces. I watched Cora Flynn’s. I saw confusion . . . then fear . . . then anger.
“I need you to leave now, Ryan. I have a lot to do here. You can send me the bill later if you’d rather.”
I ignored her request. “Here’s what I’m thinking,” I said. “I’m thinking the guy at Kelbo’s picked you up Wednesday night not because he wanted to get his paws on you, but because he wanted to get his paws on some photos. He didn’t find the photos because Joey knocked him out before he could. Today he came back to get them. He saw blood on the rug, possibly his own from when Joey hit him, so he got rid of it. Does that sound about right to you so far?”
Mrs. Flynn didn’t answer. She glared at me. Then she sat down at the dining table and knocked back the rest of her scotch. When the only thing left in her glass was a lump of melting ice, she put her elbows on the table, dropped her head to her hands, and began to kneed her forehead. I watched and waited. If I hadn’t been so focused on Cora Flynn massaging her forehead, I might have noticed the shadow of a 11-year-old boy who was hiding in the hallway behind the door.
Mrs. Flynn finally lifted her head from her hands.
“Why do you think this?” she asked.
“Joey heard the man yelling about photos. He said the man was big and had white hair. That matched the description I got from the bartender at Kelbo’s.”
“I don’t remember much from that night. It’s kind of blurry.”
I nodded. “I understand. But here’s the question: Did the Kelbo’s guy find the photos this time? Because if he didn’t, it stands to reason he’ll be back.”
I stood up and pulled my car keys from my pocket, ready to leave.
“Hey,” Mrs. Flynn slurred, “I thought we were having a conversation.”
With a rubbery arm, she motioned vaguely towards the chair. I sat down. She took another long drag on her cigarette. So this is what it’s like to handle a case on my own, I thought. Landing smack in the middle of peoples’ messed up and troubled lives. I liked it better when Lou did the heavy lifting. Running errands was a whole lot easier and less complicated. Was I even cut out for this work? But before I could descend further into doubt, Mrs. Flynn spoke up.
“Remember Chip Jordan?” she said, seemingly out of nowhere.
“Sure. Who doesn’t?” I was intrigued by this unexpected new topic.
“Well, a few weeks ago I was sorting through Victor Dargin’s files. If you read the trades then you know—”
“I don’t.”
“Mr. Dargin is . . . rather was a VP at Pinnacle. Head of production. He’d been there for years. Then about a month ago he was fired. Escorted out is more like it. Word on the lot is he had a blow-out with the execs in New York. Anyway, I don’t know about all that, but whatever happened, it was sudden. Things were slow in Research — dead is more like it — so I was asked to go though Dargin’s files, decide what to toss, what to keep in the office for his replacement, what to store in the archives. That’s when I came across the photos.”
“Of Chip Jordan?”
She nodded. “But they weren’t ordinary publicity stills. They were personal.”
“What do you mean?”
“One showed him sitting by a swimming pool with another man. Another showed him and that same man — swimming. And in the last one, he and the man are in the water at the side of the pool.”
“Who was the other man?”
“Beats me. The thing is, all the photos were autographed. So right away I’m thinking maybe they’re worth something. I had been worrying how to come up with the money to send Joey to summer camp, nothing fancy, just day camp while I was at work, and here were these photos, in an unmarked folder in the back of a filing cabinet. Autographed. I know it must sound like I’m making excuses, but that’s just how it was. What year did Chip Jordan die?”
Chip Jordan had been a childhood idol of mine. In grade school, my buddies and I all wanted to be as cool as Chip. He had come on the scene just before Brando or Dean, and we considered him to be as cool as they got.
I remember asking Lou why a rich and famous movie star like Chip Jordan would kill himself. Lou said something about money not being everything, and other words of wisdom that didn’t make much sense to me at the time.
“Around ’51 or ’52,” I said.
“So you see,” Mrs. Flynn said defensively, “by the time I found them, the photos must have been sitting there for over a decade. So I took one. Big deal. I brought it over to a memorabilia shop in Hollywood to find out what it was worth. Tinseltown Treasures. The man running the shop gave me a hundred dollars cash on the spot, practically begged me for more if I had any. A few days later, I brought him the other two photos and he paid me another hundred each.”
“That’s a lot of dough.”
“Frankly, I was relieved to be done with them. I didn’t feel guilty, I mean nobody was ever going to miss those old photos . . . well, maybe a little guilty. But mostly I was nervous. Ever since then I’ve been scared that somehow the studio would find out, that I’d get caught and lose my job.”
“Did you give the memorabilia shop man your name or phone number? Some way to get in contact with you?”
“No. He asked for my phone number, but I wouldn’t give it to him. I’m not that stupid.”
“And the guy at Kelbo’s?”
Mrs. Flynn shook her head. She took a drag on her cigarette. I noticed that her hands weren’t shaking anymore.
“Summer camp money,” she muttered. “It didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time, but now it’s like a bad dream that I can’t wake up from. If only I could turn back the clock a couple of weeks, I’d put those stupid photos into a Pinnacle archive box, label it, seal it up, and send it over to the vault.”
“Did you tell anybody else about the photos,” I asked. “Anybody at all.”
“No. Absolutely not. I’m not a fool.”
She finished off her cigarette and crushed it out in the empty glass.
“That funny little man who ran the shop,” she said, “there was something strange about him.”
“What kind of strange?”
“I don’t know exactly, but he was so keen for those pictures. Could he have followed me? I told him I didn’t have any more. Could that . . . that other man . . .? Oh, I don’t know.”
She lit another cigarette. I kept quiet and waited.
“Maybe you could talk to him,” she said finally. “The man at the shop. Tell him I don’t have any more photos. Tell him to stop. Make it all go away.”
“I could talk to him, but I don’t know if it would do any good. We don’t even know that he did anything.”
“It had to be him.”
“What does he look like?”
“Little and bald. And both times I went there he was dressed in white.” She made a small noise that could have been a giggle. “He reminded me of an ice cream cone.”
CHAPTER 10
Tinseltown Treasures was located in an old brick building on a seedy Hollywood side street, jammed between a dry cleaners and an abandoned theatre. Next to the cleaners was a Chinese restaurant with a plate glass window so grimy that it was hard to see through it. I hadn’t eaten since the Fig Newtons in the car with Joey that morning, but even the grumbling in my stomach wasn’t enough to get me into the Chinese joint.
Tinseltown’s front window was plastered with vintage movie posters. A bell jingled above the door when I opened it. I shut the door behind me and the bell jingled again.
With one step, I left behind the grubby streets of “real” Hollywood, and entered a different world. Movie posters covered the walls; some were behind glass in elaborate frames, others were simply taped to the wall. Dr. Cyclops, Grand Hotel, Christmas In July, Mutiny on the Bounty, Mildred Pierce. The center of the room was filled
with rows of file cabinets, flat oversized horizontal drawers, and shelves bulging with movie-themed knick knacks. At the back of the store was a counter and cash register. A short pudgy man with a round pink face, white mustache, and a fringe of white fluff circling his bald head, stepped out from behind the counter. He wore a white linen suit, a red and white polka dot bowtie, and a red satin vest. Where Mrs. Flynn had seen ‘ice cream cone,’ I saw one part barbershop quartet, one part professor/wizard in The Wizard of Oz.
“May I help you, sir?” the little man asked.
“Just browsing.”
“Wonderful. Wonderful. Take all the time you need.” He put his hands together as if in prayer. “If you need any assistance, please don’t hesitate to ask. Oscar Panozzo at your service.”
“Thanks.”
I ambled up one of the aisles. My first objective was to see how Chip Jordan photo prices compared with similar items. I opened one of the file drawers at random and began flipping through the photos. Immediately, I felt Oscar Panozzo’s presence behind me. He was inching closer. Now he was looking over my shoulder, practically breathing in my ear. I ignored him. The photos were old. None were autographed. The only movie star I recognized was Rudolph Valentino.
“Ah, the Silent Era,” whispered Panozzo.
I turned around. Panozzo took a couple of tiny steps back.
“I don’t mean to disturb you, sir,” he said, “but it’s so rare that someone of your youth has an enthusiasm for the marvelous era of silent cinema. Here at Tinseltown, you’d be thrilled to know, we have the largest collection of Silent Era lobby cards in the United States.”
The little bald man was beaming.
“Actually, I’m not really interested in the silent era,” I said.
“Oh.” He looked crestfallen.
“Do you have any James Dean? Or Marlon Brando?”
“Certainly! We have full sheets, lobby cards, production stills, head shots of nearly every significant Hollywood movie star since D.W. Griffith said ‘roll em’.”
“How about a Brando?”
“Ah! Of course! Come with me. I have an absolute treasure for you!”
I followed Panozzo down the aisle. He opened one of the low horizontal drawers. Brando — full lipped, scowling, a bandolier draped across his body — stared up at me.