EQMM, January 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  We'd reached the front door by then. Paddy put a hand on its knob but made no move to open it. “I'm guessing you don't see Miss Nouveau's autograph as the real target,” he said.

  "It's hard to imagine, given the trouble we've had getting signatures for her petitions.” That left the woman whose name resonated faintly for me. “Why did saying Nola Nielsen give Findley the sniffles?"

  Paddy looked mildly surprised. “It was before you hit town, come to think of it. Still, I'd have thought you'd have heard. She died badly. Back around nineteen-thirty. Killed herself, maybe."

  I remembered then. “She died in a closed garage, sitting in her car with the engine running. Why the maybe?"

  Paddy shrugged. “On account of the kind of life she'd led, the wild, Roaring Twenties kind of life. Booze certainly, drugs probably, men excessively. One of her beaus was a gangster she threw over. The rumors about her suicide not being entirely her idea mainly involved him. Morrie Bender."

  There was nothing vague about my memories of Morrie Bender. He'd still been someone to tiptoe around back when I'd started with Hollywood Security after the war.

  A horn sounded outside. Findley, anxious to relieve those corporate minds. Paddy didn't stir.

  "The accepted version of Nielsen's death was that she'd killed herself over talking pictures,” he said. “She made exactly one—Sunshine, I think it was called—but it hadn't been released at the time of her death. Supposedly, she was worried about it flopping. Then when it finally came out, it was a big hit. Some of the good reviews Sunshine got may have been flowers for Nielsen's grave, but the general thinking was that she'd gotten herself worked up over nothing. She would have done fine in the talkies if she'd given herself the chance."

  "Or if someone else had,” I said. “Bender has a place in Brentwood Heights, doesn't he?"

  "Yes, and you've got a wife and kids. Bender may be eighty-something, but he hasn't mellowed much, not from what I hear. And he's still well connected. I'm officially denying you permission to bother him."

  "How about unofficially?"

  Findley tooted his horn again, a little forlornly, it seemed to me.

  Paddy said, “My money's on this kidnapping idea. I'm thinking we'll hear something on the subject in an hour or so at the latest. Check in with me then, care of Grauman's."

  "You didn't answer my question."

  Paddy sighed. “No, I didn't. If you should bump into Morrie Bender by accident, give him my love."

  * * * *

  5.

  It took a little driving around, but by and by I accidentally found myself at the Morrie Bender estate. It was overlandscaped on the street side and gated, the gate manned by a well-dressed mob trainee. A slightly older one greeted me when I pulled up at the house. I'd gotten that far on the strength of Hollywood Security's name. The greeter, a solidly built guy with a Marlon Brando hairline, wanted more.

  "This is regarding?” was how he put it.

  "Nola Nielsen,” I said.

  He repeated it to get the pronunciation down while he checked me for a gun. Then he looked over the Corsair and said, “Jack Paar told a pretty funny joke about Edsels the other night. I can't remember how it went."

  "It was something about how the guys who drive them don't like to be kept standing out in the sun, I bet.” I was a little sensitive about Edsel jokes.

  Brando lost his grin, found it again, and said, “How do they feel about getting tossed out on their ears? Wait a minute,” he added, holding up a beefy hand. “Tell me when I get back."

  He came back quickly, but it wasn't to toss me out. He showed me inside, acting puzzled about it, if not disappointed.

  During my wait, I'd examined the house, a heavily timbered ranch, and imagined the interior to be something on the order of a hunting lodge. Instead, it was like a Park Avenue apartment writ large. Not that I got much of a tour. The man I'd come to see was out back, sitting next to a swimming pool with a mountain view.

  Morrie Bender was thin and frail, gray-skinned and nearly hairless, but walking out to brace him, I felt a little like I had the day my outfit boarded ship for occupied France. It was his gaze that conveyed the threat. Though his eyes were yellow and rheumy, the look they were giving me was as fragile as a bayonet. It was a look I'd seen once or twice before in the eyes of dying hard-cases, a willingness—even a desire—to take someone with them.

  He smiled when I drew close, but it didn't soften things. “Hollywood Security, huh?” he said. “You one of Paddy Maguire's boys?"

  "Yes,” I said, trying not to glance at the chair he hadn't invited me to use.

  "How is the big mick?” he asked. He seemed to do about half his talking on the inhale.

  "Fine."

  "Getting older?"

  "Yes."

  That pleased him. “I tried to get him drunk one night. At Ciro's, maybe. In ‘forty-three, I think it was. I was sixty-five then. I thought Maguire knew something I wanted to know, so I kept the drinks coming. That was a waste of my money. I changed the combination on my safe the very next day. I was that sure I'd told him more than he'd told me. Nothing about Nola Nielsen, though. I'm damn sure of that."

  "Paddy didn't send me. He didn't want me to bother you."

  "What bother?"

  "But he did ask me to give you his regards."

  Those were the magic words. “Have a seat,” Bender said. “Tell me why you're here."

  I started to tell him about Nielsen's slab. He stopped me with a smile that really was a smile.

  "I was there the night she made that thing,” he said. “It was nineteen twenty-eight. I was fifty. Thought I was still twenty-five. I wasn't at Grauman's officially. That wouldn't have looked so good. But I was in the crowd. They had a regular little ceremony. We went dancing afterwards, I remember. Nola had her motor wound up that night, I can tell you."

  That brought us to the awkward part of my pitch. Experience had taught me that there was no smooth way to accuse someone of a crime, so I dove right in, describing the theft of the slab from the warehouse. Luckily, Bender had even more experience as an accusee than I had as an accuser. And he'd been accused of a lot worse than stealing concrete. His smile barely dimmed.

  "You think I saw that story on the TV and decided I had to have her footprints as a keepsake? Not a bad thought, except that I hated that little blonde's guts. If I'd lifted that slab, it'd been so I could use it for a urinal.

  "So now you're wondering what happened after that night at Grauman's in ‘twenty-eight to get me feeling that way. So I'll tell you. She walked out on me. Me. She thought she had to choose between her movies and me and she chose her movies.

  "I would have talked her out of it, except that she ran away to New York, a town where I wasn't welcome. Spent most of nineteen twenty-nine there. Working with Broadway dramatic coaches so she'd be able to talk on the screen, that was the story. But it was really to give me time to cool off, which I did."

  "You don't sound that cool right now,” I said.

  "That's over what she did when she came back. She almost got me a seat in the gas chamber. After she killed herself, I had the cops in my hip pocket for weeks. They'd never been able to get me for something I'd actually done. But I was sure they'd get me for that, something I had no part in. Then it blew over."

  End of story and, I was afraid, the interview. I threw out another question. “Do you know anyone else who might have wanted a keepsake of Nola? Did she have any family?"

  "Back East somewhere. I can't remember their name. Nola Nielsen wasn't her real name, but so what? Everybody changes his name out here. Even me. My real name's Benderwitz. That's how I signed myself in at Ellis Island in nineteen oh-one. I was twenty-three."

  "How about Nola's friends?"

  "I remember one pal of hers. Sort of a paid companion, a girl from her hometown. Her name was Rita something. She was a looker herself, was Rita. And a wildcat too, like Nola. They were a pair, those two."

  The memory of that pai
r wore him out, or maybe it was all the talking. He waved me out of my chair. “Thanks for coming. Tell that big mick boss of yours to keep his nose clean."

  * * * *

  6.

  It was time to report in and get an update on the kidnappers, but I still thought they were figments of Paddy's imagination. So I drove downtown to the courthouse and followed a trail in its worn linoleum that led me to the office of the county recorder. There I asked to see a copy of Nola Nielsen's last will and testament. I was hoping the will would point me toward Nielsen's family and friends, that some of them would be in the greater Los Angeles area, and that at least one of those would still be breathing.

  The clerk, who was old enough to have delivered Nielsen's newspapers, said it would take awhile. He pointed to a row of gunmetal chairs and told me to make myself comfortable. I made myself uncomfortable instead worrying over whether Nielsen had bothered to change her name legally. Not every star got around to doing that. If Nielsen hadn't, her will would be filed under Gladys Knockwurst or whatever her parents had christened her. And I'd be scrambling around trying to track that name down.

  It was a nice little worry, more than enough to keep my pipe going at a steady clip. About the time I'd reduced all its tobacco to ash, the clerk returned with an extra-long folder and good news. Nola Nielsen had died under her screen name, like a good star should.

  Though typed on a long sheet of paper, the will was fairly short. There was a token bequest to Dr. and Mrs. Herbert Axlerod of Columbus, Georgia, Nielsen's parents, almost certainly. Another small gift went to “my pal” Rita Koenig. She had to be the Rita that Bender remembered so fondly, the paid companion. The bulk of Nielsen's estate went into a trust to be managed by the Golden State Bank and Trust. The documents defining the trust weren't included in the folder.

  I asked my friend the clerk for that missing piece, and he referred me to Golden State's trust department. “And good luck with that,” he said.

  On my way out, I stopped in the lobby at one of a bank of pay phones. My phone's directory contained no listing for a Rita Koenig. I then used the phone itself to call Grauman's front office. The receptionist knew exactly who Patrick J. Maguire was. Everybody in the building did by then.

  "Talk them out of a drink yet?” I asked when the man himself came on the line.

  "No. It's drier here than a Baptist funeral. No calls from any slabnappers either. I'm running out of stories."

  "That'll be the day. Do we know anybody at Golden State Bank and Trust?” I described my visit with Bender and my interest in Nielsen's will.

  "Seems to me I played canasta with a guy from that bank once,” Paddy said. “You want the details of the trust, I take it. Call me back in an hour."

  It was lunchtime by then, for the dawn patrol at least. I visited a little eatery near the courthouse that had a lot of associations for me, good and bad. I spent awhile wandering down memory lane. Then I called my wife to see how the latest screenplay was going. Then I called Paddy.

  "I may have let you down,” he said. “My old canasta partner wasn't as forthcoming as I'd hoped he'd be. According to him, Nielsen's trust was dissolved in nineteen fifty-five. It'd been set up for the benefit of a single male child. Once the kid turned twenty-five, the thing just folded."

  "Whose child?"

  "My friend wouldn't say, wouldn't even give me the kid's name. That makes me think it had to be Nielsen's. I never heard she had one, but she might have gone out of her way to keep it quiet. That would fit with all this trust secrecy."

  I wasn't as fast on ages as Morrie Bender, but I'd spotted a problem. “If this kid was twenty-five in nineteen fifty-five, he was born in nineteen thirty, after Nielsen got back from her year in New York."

  "So she got knocked up out East in ‘twenty-nine. Maybe by some stockbroker she'd talked off a ledge when the market crashed. You do funny things when you think the world's ending."

  "But she made a movie in nineteen thirty, her talkie, Sunshine. Somebody would have noticed if she'd been pregnant."

  My boss wasn't concerned. “It only took a few weeks to shoot a movie back then, even with microphones bollixing up the works. She must not have been showing yet."

  It occurred to me that I should have spent my lunch hour down at the Times, boning up on little things like the actual date of Nielsen's death. Paddy's thoughts were tending a different way.

  "I wonder if Morrie Bender knew that she'd taken up with someone back East. Could have given him a little more reason to have shut her up in that garage. Assuming he was the jealous type. You'll have to ask Miss Koenig about that."

  "Rita Koenig? How am I supposed to find her?"

  "Did I forget to mention that? She was the mystery kid's guardian. My banker friend let that slip. She drew a monthly check from the trust right through nineteen fifty-five. The address where those checks were sent is up in Vesta. Got a pencil?"

  * * * *

  7.

  Vesta was a sunny little spot on the coast about halfway to Santa Barbara. It was so sunny on this particular afternoon that the dark glasses I'd used to fight the Pacific's glare on the drive north were still in place when I knocked at the door of the seaside cottage where Rita Koenig's trust fund checks had landed. The shades might have accounted for the reception I got from the lady of the house, which was cool. The woman, who was wearing a bathing suit under an unbuttoned housedress, might have taken me for a cop or even an IRS agent. She told me that Rita Koenig didn't live there anymore. Hadn't for years. And who the hell cared where she was now?

  I still did. I went in search of a phone book, as I had in L.A., and found Koenig right off. The listing had her on a street called Chester, which turned out to be more than a few blocks from the ocean. And on the wrong side of the tracks, if Vesta had been big enough to have tracks. The actual address belonged to a boardinghouse, an old brick one. Koenig wasn't home, but her landlady was, a Marjorie Main look-alike who was weeding an overrun flower bed. She was more than happy to tell me where Koenig worked. I'd remembered to reveal my steely-blue eyes this time and even to bat their lashes occasionally.

  Koenig's place of business was a diner that made the hole-in-the-wall where I'd had my lunch look like the Brown Derby. Koenig turned out to be the first person I came to when I entered, a little fiftyish woman perched on a stool behind the diner's cash register. Bender had called Koenig a wildcat, but somehow she'd changed into a wild bird over the years. She reminded me of a sparrow, though the coloring of her dyed hair and penciled brows was much darker. She had sharp features and quick eyes, the eyes made extra prominent by her glasses. I thought for a second that she might be in charge, but when I asked for five minutes of her time, she glanced at a big guy who was scraping down the grill.

  "I get a break in ten minutes,” she said. “There's a bench out front.” She pushed a pack of Old Golds my way and held out a hand, palm up.

  "I don't use them,” I said.

  "I do,” she said back.

  I paid her, found the bench, and started in to field-strip and clean my pipe. I was twisting the stem back into place when Koenig came out. The first thing she did was to hold her face up to the sun for a few seconds. From the look of her skin, the action was more a ritual than an impulse.

  She'd specified the bench, but she didn't use it. “All I do is sit,” she said and held out her hand for the Old Golds.

  I towered over her when I stood to light her cigarette, so I sat down again so I could look into those magnified eyes.

  At first she only smoked, going at it so hard it got me longing for a Lucky Strike. Then she asked, “What's this about Nola Nielsen?"

  I'd mentioned the actress back at the cash register. The name had gotten Koenig's full attention then. Now she was acting as if it barely rang a bell.

  "I'm trying to trace her next of kin,” I said, “regarding some property of hers in Los Angeles.” A four-by-four chunk of property, suitable for driveway repair.

  "What makes you th
ink I even knew her?"

  I decided to jump us ahead a few moves. “She trusted you to raise her son. And you drew a monthly check from her estate for twenty-five years."

  "Never trust a banker,” Koenig said. It was a sentiment popular with people old enough to remember 1929. The cashier went further. “Never trust anybody. That's what I always told Nola. Nobody in Hollywood was what he seemed. But she trusted everybody, even me."

  "When did that start?"

  "Way before Hollywood. She and I grew up together back in Georgia. Even then I was just tagging along. Her people had money. Mine didn't."

  "Is that where the trust fund came from?"

  "Some of it. From a rich aunt. But a lot of it was Nola's own dough. She was making a thousand a week once she hit it big in pictures. That was serious money back then."

  It still was, for people like Koenig and me. I said, “Then The Jazz Singer came out and the world changed. What happened next?"

  "Nola ran off to New York to learn how to talk without a Southern accent. Took her the better part of a year."

  Koenig had worked the same trick, but then she'd had thirty years in little Vesta. She was on her second Old Gold by then, lighting it from the first.

  "She came back pregnant. Some Broadway director, she said. Might have been some Broadway cabdriver. She wasn't far along. She had time to make one last picture."

  "Sunshine," I said.

  It was more information than a flunky trying to trace a next of kin should have had, but I didn't expect Koenig to call me on it. I'd already asked her questions I shouldn't have asked and revealed more interest in her past than I should have had. She seemed more than willing to chat, at least about the dead and buried.

  "After the movie, we went upstate and hid out until Nola had the kid. That was the start of the bad times."

  "What happened?"

  "Nola got the blues. They can hit a woman bad after her kid is born."