Groucho Marx, Master Detective

by Ron Goulart

  “For how long?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Was Peg planning to come and get it back later on?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean, Mr. Marx,” Hulda said. “Well, I got the idea, though she never said it directly, that this wasn’t a long-term thing. That she’d be taking the packet back in a week or so.”

  “What about her career? Did she tell you about signing a contract with one of the studios?”

  “She did, Mr. Marx,” Hulda replied. “And it was the oddest thing, because I hear the girls talking around the hotel and I have a conversation with one or another of them sometimes. Anyway, the rumor I’d been hearing was that Peg was about set to sign with Paragon. I thought that sounded wonderful and when, out of the blue, she invited me to dinner, why, I congratulated her.”

  “But she said it wasn’t Paragon?”

  Hulda blinked. “Yes, exactly. It was funny. She laughed, but it was—well, I always liked Peg a lot—but this was a nasty laugh. I didn’t like the sound of it at all. She said she was going to be a star at Monarch.”

  “She tell you why?”

  “I asked her, but all she’d say was that Eli Kurtzman and his toadies had finally realized her true worth. Something like that.”

  Groucho stood up. “What about the pictures, Hulda?”

  “I never, honestly, opened the packet to look at them.”

  “But you knew there were snapshots in there.”

  “Well, I was curious. She reached into her purse and slipped out this little package wrapped in green paper, slid it across the table and told me to slip it into my purse in a hurry,” Hulda said. “When I got home here, well, I felt the package, held it up to the light. It was snapshots, I’m near certain, about six or seven of them.”

  Groucho said, “You sure you’re going to be all right, Hulda?”

  “Fine, I’m fine.”

  “Then I’ll be up and doing,” he announced.

  “Thank you for helping me, Mr. Marx,” she said. “And good luck on your new radio show.”

  “The radio show,” said Groucho as he moved for the doorway. “Gad, I’d nearly forgotten about that.”

  Twenty-three

  Groucho leaned closer to the microphone and said, “And just what makes you think your husband is dead, Mrs. Uppercase?”

  “Well, you can see for yourself, Mr. Transom. Just look at how he’s lying there in front of the fireplace.”

  “Ah, so that’s your husband, is it? I thought it was a bearskin rug.”

  “Poor Rowland was a bit shaggy, but that’s his still and lifeless form.”

  “I was wondering why a grizzly bear would be wearing a houndstooth suit.”

  “Can you solve—”

  “Of course, there have been times when I wondered why a hound would be wearing a bearskin cap. And once I even wondered where elephants go to die. But then I was invited to an elephant’s funeral and that settled that.”

  “Try to curb your silliness, Mr. Transom.”

  “And you try to curb that spaniel of yours, Mrs. Uppercase. Everybody in the neighborhood is complaining about—”

  “Are you sure that you’re even a detective?”

  “Of course I’m a detective. If you’d like, I can show you my diploma. Or better yet—I can show you the scar from my operation. That’s in a more interesting place. Although, come to think of it, the diploma’s in an interesting place, too. That is, if you consider Cleveland, Ohio, an interesting place. But as for me—”

  “Please, Mr. Transom, please. What am I to do about my poor departed husband?”

  “Well, the first thing I’d do is throw a blanket over him. Frankly, I’m getting tired of looking at the fellow.”

  “No, I mean—”

  “And while you’re at it, if you have an extra blanket, toss one over yourself, Mrs. Uppercase. You’re no sight for sore eyes yourself, you know. In fact, if I owned a site like you, I’d build a parking lot on it.”

  “Mr. Transom, ace detective or no ace detective, I don’t intend to pay you twenty dollars a day, plus expenses, to be insulted.”

  “No, for insults this good the fee is fifty bucks.”

  “It seems to me that if you were any sort of detective—you’d start asking questions.”

  “You’re absolutely right. So here’s a question—When do we eat?”

  “No, I mean questions about my poor husband.”

  “Well, it’s no use asking when he’s going to eat, is it?”

  “Mr. Transom, you are—”

  “Being dead will take your appetite right away. Anybody who really wants to lose weight should seriously consider dropping dead. And perhaps that was your husband’s motive, Mrs. Uppercase, because he does look a bit on the pudgy side. Or maybe it’s just the suit. But then, who’d buy a pudgy suit?”

  From inside the glass booth, the director said, “That’s sounding great, Groucho. We’ll take our break here and come back to the rehearsal in about an hour.”

  Groucho dropped his script to the studio floor, hopped to the left and put both arms around Margaret Dumont, whom we’d been able to land for the part of Mrs. Uppercase. “Maggie, my pet, you are another Bernhardt, another Bankhead, another Constance Collier.” He kissed her on the cheek with a loud smack. “It’s only too bad nobody is in the market for another one of any of those ladies.”

  She smiled politely and disengaged herself from his grip. “You stepped on one of my lines, Groucho. Please, don’t do that on the night of the actual broadcast.”

  “It’s only because, when I’m in your radiant presence, I get all flustered and—oh, gorsh.” He dug his toe into the carpeted floor and rolled his eyes.

  “You were sensational, Groucho,” said Junior Orem over the mike in the booth. “If I’m any judge, this show is going to be a smash hit.”

  “If you were any judge, you wouldn’t be passing off South American cathouse floor sweepings as coffee,” said Groucho, unwrapping a cigar.

  “You’re a great little kidder, Groucho,” said our sponsor, beaming down at Groucho through the slanted glass window of the control room.

  “Let this be a lesson to you, Rollo,” said Groucho, picking up the script again and joining me down in the front row of seats. “Once you establish yourself as a comedian, you can thereafter tell every fool and nitwit on the face of the earth the unvarnished truth about themselves and they’ll laugh and take it as a joke.”

  “That wasn’t the truth you told, Orem,” I mentioned. “If Orem Brothers Coffee was made from whorehouse sweepings, it’d taste a lot better than it does.”

  “Well, perhaps, but the great insight into life I’ve just imparted still holds true,” he said, chomping on the end of the cigar but not lighting it. “Speaking of seamy romance, are you rushing right over to Jane’s crib after this rehearsal?”

  “Nope, her boss is still sick and she’s got to turn out a Hillbilly Willie Sunday page by tomorrow,” I answered. “I won’t be seeing her at all tonight.”

  “Ah, the old I-have-to-draw-for-the-funny-papers excuse,” he said, leaning back in the seat. “You’d think a woman of her evident intelligence would be able to come up with a better one than that. I bet she and Rod Tommerlin are, even as we speak, rolling in the hay and exchanging fevered words of … what’s wrong, Rollo?”

  My expression must’ve indicated that I wasn’t amused. “Nothing, Groucho,” I said. “It’s only…” I shrugged.

  “You’re not jealous of that dispenser of cornpone, are you?”

  “Not really, but I think he has made a few passes at Jane and that annoys me.”

  “Tommerlin makes passes at all women from the age of fifteen upwards,” he explained. “Make that fourteen and up. He’s notorious for his amorous lunges and there’s been a campaign initiated to put saltpeter in his food or possibly get him a leash. Don’t worry about Jane, she’s not going to succumb to a putz like Tommerlin.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “We seem
to have settled your lovelorn problems for the nonce,” said Groucho. “If we locate Justin LaSalle, we can settle them for the nance. Let us go then, you and I, and get a bite to eat. We can discuss what progress we’ve made today on the case and plan our strategy.” He stood up, stretched and then waved at Margaret Dumont, who was sitting up near one of the microphones making notes in the margin of her script. “I won’t be able to meet you in your dressing room as planned, Maggie. But we’re still on for the dog races later in the evening.” He tugged me up out of my seat. “Let’s be out and about, Rollo.”

  Twenty-four

  The rehearsal ended at a few minutes after ten and at ten-thirty, after traveling a circuitous zigzagging route through Hollywood, I was parking my coupe on a side street off Sunset. The night was windy and the leaves of the pepper trees overhead were rattling and sighing.

  Groucho twisted around in the passenger seat so that he could scan the night street behind us. “Well, there’s still no sign of anybody tailing us, thugs, goons, assassins or what have you,” he concluded after a moment. “We’ve succeeded in eluding all of our potential pursuers. And, Rollo, it’s not easy to be sly and unobtrusive when you’re tooling round in a vehicle that’s the color of a lemon with jaundice.”

  “You were a mite vague at dinner,” I reminded him. “Explain to me again why we’re dropping in on this particular photographer.”

  Groucho found a cigar in his coat pocket. “I got to thinking—something I try to do at least once a week—about snapshots and photos. Now then, if you shoot a roll of film of your dear old grandmother—do you have a grandmother, by the way?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, you shoot a roll of some photogenic relative or other cavorting at the beach or standing on the front lawn and squinting into the lens. That presents no problem, since you can openly pop into the nearest Thrifty Drugstore or the corner camera shop and have it developed without fear. Nothing wrong with snapping pictures of some doddering old coot with sand in his shoes.”

  “I see, yeah. You can’t do that with a batch of supposedly incriminating photos, especially if they happen to show people in the sack together.”

  “When I knew Peg, she told me that she’d now and then snap some somewhat steamy pics of some of her lady friends and their beaus,” he continued.

  “But nothing steamy of you?”

  “Rollo, in all my long and varied career as a mangy lover, I’ve never been dimwitted enough to let anybody get a shot of me in dishabille,” he assured me. “As I was saying before the heckling commenced—while I was driving home from scenic Venice this afternoon, I recalled that Peg always had Eddie Sutterford develop those special rolls of film for her.”

  “He’s the guy who took those publicity shots of her, isn’t he?”

  “The same. Eddie specializes in publicity stuff, plus some glamour photography and cheesecake of varying degrees of respectability.” Groucho unwrapped the cigar. “It occurred to me that if Peg had some pictures that she couldn’t trust to a regular developing outfit—why, she’d probably go to Eddie. He’d done similar stuff for her before, he liked her and she could trust him.”

  “He might not, even if he did do the job, admit it.”

  “Oh, I know a few things about Eddie’s shady past that’ll probably prompt him to confide in us.” Thrusting the cigar between his teeth and then glancing carefully around, he stepped out of the car and into the windy night.

  * * *

  The lights were on at Eddie Sutterford’s photography studio, which occupied a shingle cottage sitting up on the crest of a grassy lot on Sunset Boulevard. The close-cropped lawn had several small billboards, each about the size of an upended Ping-Pong table, dotting it. Floodlights illuminated huge portrait photos of movie actresses.

  “Reminds one of Easter Island,” observed Groucho. “Except the heads there are not nearly so cute.”

  Walking up the twisting gravel path to the photographer’s front door, we passed giant photos of Ginger Rogers, Alice Faye, Joan Bennett and Barbara Stanwyck.

  Groucho tapped his cigar with his forefinger, and ashes and sparks went scattering away on the night wind. “Zeppo is Stanwyck’s agent,” he mentioned as we approached the porch. “He also manages the venerable Evelyn Venable. I mention that fact solely because I do so enjoy saying Evelyn Venable aloud.”

  “I’ll write it into the next script.”

  “By the way, I didn’t actually step on any of Maggie Dumont’s lines at the damned rehearsal,” he said, puffing on the cigar. “The dear lady is getting along in years and has become increasingly grumpy and just a teeny-weeny bit paranoid.”

  “Groucho, she’s exactly the same age as you are.”

  He’d been reaching for the brass knocker, but instead he stopped still and rose up on his toes. “I find that unbelievable, Rollo,” he told me, settling down on his heels. “Yet I suppose it must be her dissolute life style that has caused her to age so incredibly, whereas my own sedate mode of existence, which your average choirboy would find dull, accounts for the glow of youth I exude.”

  I reached around him and whacked the knocker, which was in the shape of a tiny bulldog head, several times against its brass plate.

  That produced no immediate results.

  After taking another deep puff of his cigar, Groucho whapped the upper panel of the door with his fist. “Open up, Sutterford! We’ve had a complaint that you’re photographing totally naked fat ladies in there.”

  “In a minute, Groucho,” called a reedy voice. “Hold on, huh?”

  “At least nobody seems to have tied him up and dumped him in a closet,” said Groucho. “Although, considering Eddie’s sexual proclivities, he’d probably rather enjoy that.”

  The wind hit at the door just as the photographer opened it. The door went flapping back into him.

  Groucho jumped across the threshold, pulling me in after him. With his help, Sutterford got the door shut again.

  He was a plump man, about five foot six and almost bald. His skin, which was dotted with perspiration, was a bluish white in color and he smelled faintly of chemicals. “Always a great kick to see you, Groucho,” Sutterford assured him. He stayed put in the hallway.

  “I know, Eddie. I can tell by the festive mood my advent seems to have put you in.” Groucho exhaled smoke. “This is my associate, Frank Denby.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” He didn’t extend his hand. “The situation here is this, Groucho. I’m in the middle of a shoot and—”

  “Gad, sir, don’t tell me you actually do have a naked fat lady on the premises?”

  “Nothing like that,” he said. “It’s only a young starlet who wants some cheesecake shots for her portfolio.”

  “How young?” Groucho’s eyebrows climbed slightly.

  “She’s of age, don’t worry,” said Sutterford, glancing at a closed door across the hall. “The thing is, Groucho, she’s shy about having strangers watching when—”

  “I’m noted for my ability to become almost sickeningly friendly with just about any female in under three minutes, Eddie,” Groucho told him. “So introduce us and this little girl and I will be jolly chums in nothing flat.”

  “She’s not a child, but—”

  “Tell you what.” Groucho took hold of the photographer’s coat sleeve just above the elbow. “Let’s move from blarney to the real purpose of this visit. I actually dropped by, knowing that you usually work late in this sinkhole, to talk to you about something other than what goes on in your studio between you and undraped maidens.”

  Sutterford pulled free of Groucho’s grip and took a few steps back along the corridor. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  Groucho slouched closer to him. “Peg McMorrow.”

  The photographer glanced again at the closed door. “This isn’t a good time.”

  “On the contrary, it’s an ideal time,” contradicted Groucho. “Otherwise I might drop in elsewhere and talk about other topics. Such as, for exa
mple, the part you played in that picture-taking session down in Malibu only last—”

  “Okay, all right, Groucho,” he said. “Let me go in and tell her to take a break. Then we can go into my office and talk.” He nodded at me, adding, “Groucho isn’t always that amiable a guy, you know.”

  “That’s a surprise to me,” I said.

  Twenty-five

  Resting both elbows on the desk, Groucho leaned closer to the uneasy photographer. “Baloney,” he accused.

  On Sutterford’s side of the small, uncluttered desk his swivel chair creaked as he leaned back, avoiding Groucho’s accusing gaze. “You have my word,” he said in his piping voice. “I haven’t developed any photos for Peg in over a year. Honestly.” He sighed. “I hadn’t even seen the poor girl in months.”

  “If they make an official search of this pest spot, Eddie, complete with warrants and fire axes,” Groucho pointed out, “they’ll probably find a hell of a lot more than just the copies of Peg’s photos that you kept for yourself.”

  “What makes you think I kept any?”

  “Because I know you, know how you work and how you think.” Groucho leaned closer.

  The photographer pulled back a few more inches, until the back of his chair bonked one of his filing cabinets. “Well, okay,” he admitted. “Yeah, I did keep a set for myself.”

  Groucho said nothing.

  After a few seconds Sutterford said, “But they’re not what you think.”

  Sitting up and spreading his hands wide, Groucho said, “I have no preconceptions. We simply want to see the damn prints.”

  “There are only five shots,” he said.

  “That’s all she took?” I asked.

  The bald photographer nodded, looking from me to Groucho. “You guys want to see them, though, huh?”

  “Better than that,” said Groucho. “I want you to hand them over to me and then forget you ever had them.”

  Very slowly, Sutterford got up. “You don’t believe she killed herself, do you?”

  “I don’t, no.”

  The photographer shuffled across his small office to another filing cabinet. He knelt, breathing heavily, and tugged out the bottom drawer. He bent further, sliding one hand under the drawer and pulling at something that was apparently attached there. “I hid them here,” he explained as he pulled out a manila envelope with pieces of tape dangling from it.