by Eve Goldberg
“I’m the only PI at Southland right now,” I said. “If you want to hire someone else, that’s your business.”
Sutton thought it over for about two seconds. “Oh, I guess you’ll do. You’re into it this far. But keep me informed, okay? And be discreet.”
“I will.”
Before leaving, I asked him one last question. I tried to make it sound off-the-cuff, my hand on the door like I was about to leave.
“By the way,” I said, “Who do you think killed Panozzo?”
“How the heck should I know? You’re the detective, what’s your theory?”
“I don’t have one yet.”
“Well don’t worry yourself too much about it. Oscar Panozzo was a no good, son-of-a-bitch blackmailer. He’s dead, we move on. Just get me those photos.”
Driving home, I thought about what Sutton had said. Was I up for this job? Or was I in over my head? I had found Joey on my own, but that was a missing kid. This was blackmail . . . and now with a murder attached. And I couldn’t shake the thought: If I hadn’t gone to interview Dargin, if I had stayed in my spot all day at Tinseltown, could I have prevented Panozzo’s death?
Ryan, don’t go down that hole. Move forward, not back.
I forced myself to focus on the case as it stood right now. First there was Leon. Everything Sutton said about sending Leon off to Europe could be true — there was a certain logic to it — or it could be a bunch of b.s. I had to find out which. And there was Victor Dargin. I now saw Victor Dargin in a brand new way.
CHAPTER 18
The next morning, I bought a bottle of OJ at the corner liquor store, perched myself on a bench facing the ocean and downed the juice. The hot, dry Santa Anas had blown in during the night, charging the morning air with electricity. Firemen’s nightmare. Surfer’s dream.
I walked across the Boardwalk and onto the beach, stepping around the palm fronds that littered the sand. Yesterday’s smog had been pushed out to sea and now hung like a dirty yellow strip on the horizon. An offshore wind was whipping up the waves. Tiny rainbows were flying off the frothy white peaks like sparks off a campfire. Perfect surfing conditions.
But not for me. Not today.
I drove to the office and returned yesterday’s phone calls. I referred the potential new client with the unfaithful wife to another PI; I’d have to work full-time on the case I already had. I listened to Mrs. Keplinger complain about the latest golf ball attack, her good-for-nothing son who never visited her, and how putting fluoride in the water was a communist plot. I advised her to call back in a couple of days if the golf ball attack continued. I called Cora Flynn. The phone rang and rang. Nobody answered. I called her work number. No answer.
I called Pan Am.
“Hello,” I said in my most sophisticated voice. “My brother flew to London a few days ago, but we haven’t heard from him since he left. I wanted to confirm that he made his flight.”
“Certainly, sir,” replied a female clerk. “What’s your brother’s full name and flight information?”
I gave it to her.
“One moment,” she said, then left me listening to a cheesy instrumental version of Mona Lisa.
“I have the information you requested,” the clerk said when she returned to the line. “We do have a Leon Vanek booked on that flight. And it appears he did board the plane.”
I felt a hit of relief that Leon had left town before Panozzo’s murder. It made things simpler if my client wasn’t a bald-faced liar. I thanked the woman and was about to hang up when I thought of something.
“That L.A. to London flight, was it non-stop?”
“No, sir. The plane made a stop at Idlewild.”
“Idlewild. Where’s that?”
“Idlewild Airport. In New York City.”
“Oh. Is there any way to be certain that my brother flew all the way to London?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Let’s say he decided, for some reason, to get off in New York. Would the airline keep track of that?”
“No, sir. The only passenger data we maintain are boarding records of international travelers, based on their passport information.”
“What about arriving in London — people show their passports there, right?”
“Of course. At Customs.”
“So Customs in London could tell me if he arrived.”
“I’m afraid not. Customs officials don’t write anything down. They just make sure the passport is valid, then let the passenger through.”
I thanked the woman and hung up. I thought long and hard before dialing Max Fisher. I knew Allison might be home, but saw no good way around it.
Sure enough, Allison picked up the phone. Right away I asked to speak with Max.
“Is this just a way to get back into my life?” Allison said. “Because I’ve moved on.”
“I know. It’s cool. I only want to come over to talk to Max. It’s business.”
“Just don’t get any big ideas if I’m home when you come over.”
“I won’t.”
“You might.”
“You mean, you might,” I teased.
“Very funny. I won’t.”
“Neither will I.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Ryan.”
Was it my imagination, or was Allison flirting with me? Because I was definitely flirting with her. Which was the exact opposite of my plan. We had gone from “I’ve moved on” to flirting in about ten seconds.
I felt elated. But this was absurd. We were over. So why were we doing this? Why was I doing this?
I drove out to Malibu thinking about Allison instead of preparing what I was going to ask Max. My mind floated back from our flirting today to the first time we met. It was the summer between our junior and senior year in high school. I had a job washing dishes at a private beach club. Her parents were members. Allison and her friends would hang out behind the kitchen at the end of the day, smoking, maybe drinking a beer with “the help”. All the girls were cute and rich and looking for some action after swimming and tennis and working on their suntans all day. Their parents were usually too blitzed to notice.
Allison and I hit it off from the start. It wasn’t just that she was the best looking of all her girlfriends, but she was the smartest. At least that’s what I thought. We were together the rest of the summer, and on into senior year. She went to Santa Monica High (where all the Malibu kids went), I went to Venice, but we hung out together every weekend and whenever else possible. That’s when I started coming around her house and getting to know her family.
Entering Allison’s family world was like visiting a foreign country. Dinner at my house was me and my mom, sometimes Lou, sitting around the TV watching You Asked For It or the Huntley-Brinkley Report. Lou might tell a story about work, or we might all be silent. Mostly, I’d be focused on the liquor cabinet and putting an invisible force field around it to keep my mother away. Dinner at the Fisher’s was fun and boisterous and loose, filled with witty banter about movies and politics and books.
“Tell me, Ryan,” Allison’s father Max might say, “Whadda ya think of that Fidel Castro and his guerrillas down in Cuba? How long you think they can hold off Batista’s army? I’m giving them a week. Maybe a month tops.”
Then it was on to another subject. Integration, famine in China, the H-bomb, Harold Pinter’s new play.
Most of the time I had no idea what they was talking about. But I soaked it up and learned a thing or two along the way.
When Allison went away to college at Smith, I stayed in Venice, working for Lou, slinging burgers on the weekends at the club. Allison and I wrote letters back and forth about how much we missed each other and how great it would be when she came back for Christmas, and for the summer. But over the months, her letters became fewer and fewer. When she told me that she had met someone else — an Amherst jock on the rowing team — the truth was I had been expecting it. Still, it hurt.
When Allison
and the Amherst jock broke up, we gave it another try one summer. The sex was still great, but it was obvious to both of us that things had changed. The gap between our worlds had gotten too huge. Allison had been to Europe. She had done an internship at the Museum of Modern Art and made a big thing about meeting John Kenneth Galbraith when he came there to lecture. I was hanging out at the beach and working for Lou just enough to get by.
In September, she went back to school and that was that.
I turned left off PCH and negotiated the Fisher’s dirt driveway which curved and dipped and curved again before ending at a sprawling peach-colored rancher. I parked alongside Max’s old Studebaker Starlight. Allison’s father had made a bundle writing for the movies, but you’d never know it from his car.
Max Fisher met me at the door. He was short and squat, with a mop of curly brown hair just starting to go grey. He had thick knotted arms, and ruddy weathered skin that came from living out at the beach. He was wearing his usual uniform: plaid Bermuda shorts and Mexican sandals. No shirt. He greeted me with a big smile that crinkled the skin around his watery blue eyes.
“Long time no see,” he said good-naturedly.
“Yeah. Thanks for having me over.”
“Come on in. Let’s get a drink and go out on the deck. Still club soda?”
“Yup. On the rocks.”
“You’re a better man than I, Ryan.”
I followed him into the living room with its beachy white rattan furniture and bank of sliding glass doors that overlooked the ocean. The living and dining areas were separated by a wet bar. Max filled two glasses with ice.
“So, whaddya think of that? A Negro intellectual on the cover of Time. That’s something, huh!”
I looked at him blankly. Around Max, I often felt a bit behind the curve — like I was coming in on the tail end of a conversation I should have been listening to all along. Luckily Max was busy fixing our drinks and didn’t notice my blank expression.
“If you ask me,” he continued, “that’s who Kennedy oughtta be listening to. Baldwin’s a deep thinker, not to mention a hell of a writer. So what do you prefer, his novels or his nonfiction? I’ll take his essays any day of the week. Now Mailer . . . ”
Baldwin . . . Mailer . . . My mind drifted while Max chatted. Was Allison at home right now? I looked around the room, hoping to see some sign of her.
“. . . major talent, major asshole. Misogynist as hell. Here you go.”
He handed me my club soda. We went out onto the faded wood deck that extended out over the sand. A flock of sandpipers scampered along the shore, plunging their beaks into the wet sand when the water ebbed, darting away when the tide flowed back in.
“So, what’s this all about?” Max asked as we settled into canvas chairs facing the water.
“It’s a case I’m on. I can’t say much about it, but I was hoping—”
“What kind of case? I need a little background here, Ryan.”
“Blackmail. Compromising photographs of two men.”
“Compromising! Hah! Last time I checked the Dictionary Of American Puritan Euphemistic Slang, ‘compromising’ meant sex. Homosexual sex in this instance, I assume.”
I nodded.
“Okay, gotcha. So how can I help?”
“Do you know Victor Dargin?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Haven’t crossed paths with that son-of-a-bitch in years. Now if you tell me that Dargin is a homosexual, I’ll join the John Birch Society.”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Thank god, all’s right with the world. Okay, so what’s Dargin’s connection to your case?
“I’m not exactly sure. Maybe none. But his name’s come up and I want to get a handle on him. What can you tell me about him?”
“Well, let’s see . . . ”
Max leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms behind his head, clearly relishing the invitation to walk down memory lane.
“I first met Victor Dargin at Metro. Just after the war. He was practically a kid, but ambitious as hell. Already on the way up. Kind of a junior ax man for Louis B. He was a natural at the job — kissed ass above, shit on the little guy below. I think he actually enjoyed it. When Dore Schary came to Metro . . . when was that? ’48, ’49? . . . Anyway, Schary took an immediate disliking to Dargin. Could be because Dargin was Louis B’s stooge. Or maybe because Schary’s one of the really decent guys in Hollywood and could smell a phony a mile away. But any way you cut it, Schary and Dargin went together like spaghetti and egg rolls.”
He took a sip of his drink. “Then HUAC came to town and turned the place upside down.”
I nodded vaguely, trying to remember something, anything, about HUAC. Max caught my puzzled look.
“Come on, Ryan, don’t tell me you’ve learned nothing at Chez Fisher,” Max ribbed. “Have my years of brilliant speechifying fallen on deaf ears, excuse the cliché, or should I say ‘water-clogged’ ears?”
I took a stab at it. “McCarthy?”
“You’re in the ballpark. HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, was out to get the Reds just like McCarthy was. And scare the hell out of the American public while they were at it. HUAC arrived in Hollywood in 1947, ordered the studios to purge all the Reds . . . or suspected Reds . . . and blacklist them out of their jobs. It got ugly. And that’s an understatement. People testifying against their friends — ‘naming names’ is what we called it — others refusing to name names and losing their jobs, going to jail. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back between Schary and Dargin. Dargin was gung ho for the whole anti-Red thing. Schary was the only studio boss to seriously push back against the blacklist. So you can imagine how they hated each other.”
Max paused and grinned at me.
“Jesus, Ryan, don’t get me started. You know talking is my favorite hobby.”
“Lucky for me. So then what happened?”
“Once Schary gained the upper hand at Metro, Dargin was history. That’s when he went over to MCA and became an agent.”
“But he didn’t stay an agent.”
“Man like Dargin? No way. Just a matter of time until he worked himself back into the studios. He was the number two guy at Pinnacle when they canned him last month.”
“Why was he fired?”
“Beats me.”
“Think you could find out?”
“Hey, I might be off in the small screen boondocks, but I’ve still got my connections.”
“You’re writing for TV?”
“Don’t tell my wife.” Max laughed. “She still thinks I’ve got class.”
“How bad is it?”
“Sitcom about a Martian living in suburbia.”
“Ouch.”
“Could we please change the subject.”
“Okay. Chip Jordan. Did you know him?”
“Well, that is an about-face. But a refreshing one. So, I’ll go out on a limb here: Chip was one of the men in the photos.”
I nodded.
“Of course,” Max muttered. “I should have guessed. That would explain it.”
“Explain what?”
“I didn’t know Chip well, but that’s the thing — nobody did. He was a cipher. Extremely private. I ran into him once on a picket line during the Warner’s strike. That was back before his star rose — and his salary with it. Took a lot of guts for a young contract player like Chip to put his ass on the line like that. We got drunk afterwards at some dive in Burbank. Chip just got quiet. Not even a shit-load of booze got that kid to open up. Hardly a scintillating drinking buddy, but a solid character. At least I thought so at the time.”
“Something changed your mind?”
“You do know he testified before HUAC, don’t you?”
I shook my head.
“They held a private session for him,” Max continued, “just like with Larry Parks. And although nobody to this day knows what Chip Jordan actually said, it’s pretty much a given that he must have named names.”
; “Why did he testify, snitch out his friends?”
“Same reason as anybody, I suppose. To save his own skin. Save his career. Like I said, I didn’t really know the guy. But what a coup for the Committee, snaring a young stud like Chip. He had that rebel image. Some rebel, huh? He crumbled before the Committee like a week-old cookie.” Max shook his head. “I suppose you can never really predict the character of an individual until his foot’s to the fire.”
Just then a screen door banged shut.
“Daddy?” Allison called out from inside the house.
“Out here, Allie,” Max shouted back.
Allison came out to the deck wearing a bikini with a towel wrapped around her waist. Her blonde hair, still wet from a morning swim, was shorter than before, falling just below her shoulders. My stomach took a roller coaster ride.
I told myself to be cool. But I didn’t feel cool.
“Hi, Daddy. Hi, Ryan.” Allison tossed the words off breezily, like seeing me again for the first time in two years was nothing.
“Where’s Mom?” she asked Max.
“One of her meetings. Women Strike for Peace, SANE — I can’t keep track of them all. Hey, have you told Ryan your exciting news?
“Oh Daddy, he doesn’t want to hear about that.”
“Sure I do,” I said quickly.
“I might go to Paris. To study art history.”
“It’s quite an opportunity,” Max beamed. “She was awarded a graduate fellowship.”
“That’s fantastic,” I said, only half meaning it.
Allison shrugged. “I guess. It’s just that there’s so much happening here right now. One of my roommates from Smith is down in Birmingham working with Martin Luther King, and another friend is in Mississippi helping people register to vote. It seems kind of selfish to trot off to Paris when I could be doing something important right here.”
Max smiled wryly. “I’m sure those important things will still be here to do when you return.”
“I guess.”
Allison let the towel fall from around her waist, tossed it onto an empty deck chair.
“Well, I gotta go change,” she said. “See ya.”