Groucho Marx, King of the Jungle

by Ron Goulart

  “Yikes,” I remarked upon seeing myself in the mirror over the sink.

  There were an ugly smear of dried blood on my cheek and more darkened blood matting the hair over my ear. Turning on the faucet, I fished out my handkerchief, dampened it, and, wincing frequently, cleaned off the spot where I’d been slugged.

  Looking somewhat more presentable, I returned to the lobby and made my way to a table that offered envelopes, stationery, and postcards for the guests of the inn. I wrote Arnie Carr’s name on an envelope, folded in a sheet of blank paper, and crossed to the desk.

  Because of the fiesta, the desk clerk was wearing a sombrero. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said as I stopped in front of the registration counter. “My, looks like you’ve had a bit of an accident.”

  “I’m afraid my fiery Irish temper has gotten me into trouble once again,” I explained, handing across the envelope. “I’d like to leave this message for Arnie Carr.”

  The tassels on his sombrero jiggled as the pudgy young man turned to glance at the rows of pigeonholes behind him. “His key’s in, meaning he’s out. I’ll pop this in his box for you.” He took the spurious letter.

  Turning, he slipped it into a box that had BUNG. 3 printed beneath it.

  “Gracias,”I said, getting into the spirit of things.

  To the right of the inn’s main building was a row of a dozen or so bungalows. Red-tile roofs, white stucco walls, brass numbers on their redwood doors. I’d noticed them when I arrived.

  Bungalow 3 had a blue 1937 Plymouth coupe parked in the space next to it. Sitting in the open rumble seat was a ventriloquist dummy I hadn’t encountered before—a weak-chinned cowboy.

  Walking up to the door of the bungalow, I knocked. There was no response. I knocked again.

  Then, after making certain that there was nobody in the vicinity, I picked the lock and went inside.

  The shadowy living room smelled of old cigarettes and pungent furniture polish. The door to the bathroom was partially open, and you could hear a faucet persistently dripping.

  The blonde female ventriloquist dummy that had disappeared from the Westwood apartment was sitting stiffly in a redwood chair, seemingly staring in the direction of a large brown radio that squatted between the unmade twin beds. The radio was one of those where you had to insert a quarter to make it play for a few hours. I wondered if anybody had parted with two bits to hear our Hollywood Molly radio show.

  Against the wall rested a suitcase that matched the ones Dorothy had left behind.

  Patting the dummy on her head, I started searching the room. Taped to the underside of the only drawer in the small writing desk. I found a grey envelope.

  It contained six photographs, different from the ones we’d found in Randy Spellman’s black box. I recognized several of the people in this batch of compromising positions. There was also a crudely drawn copy of the crudely drawn map, the one that probably showed where something was buried.

  Sighing, I put all the stuff back and reaffixed the envelope where I’d found it.

  I was on my knees again, picking the lock on Dorothy’s suitcase, when the door of the motel room opened slowly.

  Rising and turning, I saw Dorothy coming in out of the bright afternoon. She was holding a .32 revolver.

  Twenty-four

  When Groucho parked his Cadillac near the beach in Santa Monica, a light mist was starting to drift in over the Pacific. It swirled around him, as he emerged from the car, smelling faintly of seaweed.

  He heard the Mermaid Tavern before he saw it. A polite-sounding jazz music came drifting in his direction. A small group was playing “Blue Moon,” with a Benny Goodman–like clarinet taking the lead.

  The club sat between a white-fronted seafood restaurant and a real estate office. The tavern was narrow, with a peach-colored stucco façade and a hanging wooden sign depicting a rather chubby smiling mermaid.

  Taking one more breath of sea air, Groucho entered the dim-lit club.

  Up on the small bandstand a slim brunette in slacks and a ribbed pullover was singing the lyrics to the Rogers and Hart tune and improvising with a little scat singing.

  A poster-board sign resting on an easel just inside the door announced, EVERY NIGHT BUT TUESDAY … WALT NEEDHAM & HIS SOPHISTICATED SWING SEXTET. WITH THE DELIGHTFUL KITTY KAHANE.

  Except for the group on the bandstand and a waiter who was taking the upended chairs down off the tables, the Mermaid Tavern was empty.

  Noticing Groucho, the clarinetist stopped playing. “Hey, you’re Groucho Marx.”

  “Yes, but I came to Santa Monica to try to forget that.” He approached the bandstand. “It seemed cheaper than joining the Foreign Legion.”

  The young singer said, “We’re just about finished rehearsing, Mr. Marx. I can talk with you in about five minutes. Okay?”

  “Play on,” Groucho ordained, seating himself at one of the small, round tables.

  The short, wide waiter came over, grinning. “Do you know what my favorite Marx Brothers movie is?”

  “Gone with the Wind?”

  “That’s not a Marx Brothers movie.”

  “It isn’t? Well then, no wonder Clark Gable got so testy every time I tried to carry Vivien Leigh up that staircase.”

  “Duck Soup,”said the persistent waiter.

  “No, thanks, I just had lunch.”

  “Duck Soup is the funniest film you boys ever made, Mr. Marx.”

  “That’s because Zeppo was in it,” Groucho explained. “And he’s a barrel of laughs. He used to be a barrel of monkeys, but he discovered, despite rumors to the contrary, that that was no fun.”

  “Well, keep up the good work.” The waiter returned to getting the place ready for the evening customers.

  The sextet finished up a swing arrangement of “Isn’t It Romantic?,” and, gathering up their instruments, drifted away into the shadows.

  Kitty Kahane came down the bandstand steps to join Groucho. “Would you like a drink, Mr. Marx? I can—”

  “Not unless your tavern stocks celery tonic, no.”

  “Okay, then let’s talk about my brother.” She rested her clasped hands on the table. “As I told you on the telephone, Doug’s not a crook. He didn’t steal one penny from those damned Bensons.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  Sighing and shaking her head, she answered, “No, Mr. Marx. I haven’t heard from Doug since he disappeared. I’m worried, especially after all this time, that something’s happened to him. That he had an accident or that somebody hurt him. Right after he went missing, I got a private detective who’s a friend of Walt Needham’s to try to track Doug down. But after a week he gave up.”

  Nodding, Groucho asked, “Do you have any idea why they’d try to frame him for stealing the money from Arthur Wright Benson, Inc.?”

  “Sure, my bet is it was that bitch.”

  “Narrow that down a bit.”

  “Alicia Benson is the bitch I mean,” explained the missing accountant’s sister. “She and Doug had a … well, I guess you could call it a romance. But she was a very moody dame, and she could be nasty. He’d pretty much made up his mind to call it quits.”

  “How close to that was the time he’d disappeared?”

  “Two, three weeks,” Cahan’s sister replied. “I told Doug, from the first time I met Alicia, that she looked like she could be a pain in the backside. But for a while, poor guy, he was really head over heels over her.”

  Groucho asked, “Did you know Randy Spellman?”

  “The actor who got shot?” She shook her head. “No, but it sounds like he’s another victim of the Ty-Gor jinx, doesn’t it? First my brother gets framed and disappears, then this Muscle Beach type gets killed.”

  “Spellman never tried to contact you?”

  A puzzled frown touched her forehead. “No, why the heck should he?”

  “Apparently he didn’t have any reason.” Groucho stood up, giving the singer his office phone number. “If you should hear fr
om your brother, let me know.”

  She said, “I have a feeling, Mr. Marx, that I’m not going to hear from him.”

  The first thing Dorothy Woodrow said was, “I’m sorry you got hit on the head, Frank. Are you okay?”

  I looked from the revolver to her face and then back to the revolver. “Fine, I’m getting used to being rendered unconscious,” I told her. “Who hit me?”

  “Oh, that was Arnie. He made a mistake.”

  “Who was he supposed to slug?”

  “He thought you were some kind of cop tailing me.” She came farther into the room, closing the door behind her. “He got worried when I was late getting back, and came looking for me. That’s how he spotted you following me.”

  “And why’d you go to the mission?”

  “I’d stopped in at the chapel to say a prayer and light a candle. I used to be a Catholic, and it’s a hard habit to break.”

  “Do you carry that gun when you go to church?”

  She slipped the revolver into her purse. “I wasn’t sure who was in here. I heard somebody moving around.”

  “What exactly,” I inquired, “is going on?”

  Dorothy sat on the edge of one of the rumpled beds, took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse. “There were some things I had to take care of,” she said. She drew a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. “And I don’t want to give myself up until the police find out who really murdered Randy.”

  “Or until Groucho and I find out?”

  She smiled very briefly. “Sorry, but I don’t have as much faith in you guys as Enery does,” she told me. “Have you found out anything?”

  “Quite a lot, but not who did it,” I answered. “You sure it wasn’t actually you?”

  “I didn’t kill him, no.”

  I was leaning back against the wall now. “Why’d you leave Westwood?”

  “I had some things to take care of.”

  “You ought to have told Enery. He’s been—”

  “Enery’s getting himself way too involved in my troubles,” Dorothy said, sighing out smoke. “That can only screw up his life and his career, Frank.”

  “You’ve moved on,” I suggested.

  She took a slow drag on the cigarette, shrugging casually. “Yeah, that might be part of it,” she admitted. “You’ve probably heard things about me, and some of them are true. I’m not the kind of person who stays put long.”

  “Apparently Enery didn’t know that.”

  “Look, I like Enery,” she said. “But even if this rotten business hadn’t happened, I would’ve … well, as you put it, moved on. That’s the way I am. Sorry.”

  “And Arnie Carr?”

  “We’re good friends. Not lovers. Not anymore, anyway.”

  “Where is he at the moment?”

  “He does an afternoon show at the club here.”

  “Why’d you bring him the dummy?”

  “Arnie decided he wanted to add her to his act for the evening shows,” Dorothy said. “So I brought her up to him. Plus which, that gave me a good excuse to get out of Westwood before the police located me.”

  “No other reason for coming to Santa Francesca?”

  She eyed me, snuffing out the cigarette in an abalone-shell ashtray atop the pay-radio. “No, Frank.”

  “So you and Arnie aren’t partners?”

  “Partners in what?”

  “Show business, anything.” I had long since decided not to mention the stuff I’d found in the gray envelope.

  “Nope.”

  “Any message for Enery?”

  She located another cigarette and lit it. “Just tell him I’m okay,” she said. “And that I’m sorry. I guess I should’ve left him a note.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I said, and left there.

  Twenty-five

  Jane’s attitude combined sympathy and annoyance. “You’d think by now,” she was saying as she applied antiseptic to my abrasions, “that you’d have developed some kind of sixth sense, Frank, and—”

  “Ouch, that stings.”

  “Good. Some sixth sense that would warn you when somebody was sneaking up to conk you.”

  I executed a sort of embarrassed schoolboy shuffle on the tiles of the bathroom floor. “I know, and I’m chagrined about lacking a sixth sense,” I said, wincing as my wife applied a bandage to the side of my head. “Fact is, I’m not all that sure I have the basic five senses.”

  Contemplating myself in the mirror over the sink, I decided I looked somewhat better than I had when I’d last taken inventory.

  Closing the door to the medicine cabinet, Jane returned to our living room.

  I followed, after one final look at myself, and settled down beside her on the sofa.

  “How did Enery take the news?” Jane asked.

  I’d already told her what I’d found when I searched Arnie Carr’s room at the Francesca Mission Inn and about my conversation with Dorothy. “I gave him a somewhat censored account,” I said. “I didn’t tell Enery about the blackmail stuff, softened Dorothy’s reasons for departing from Westwood.”

  “In other words, you lied.”

  “I lied, yeah. Eventually I’ll have to tell him about Dorothy,” I said. “Right now, I don’t think we know everything that’s going on.”

  “What if she really did kill Spellman?”

  “No, I don’t think that’s—”

  Our doorbell rang.

  Dorgan, who’d been slumbering noisily in Jane’s studio, awoke and commenced barking.

  Getting up, I crossed to the door.

  Our bloodhound, tail wagging, came trotting behind me.

  Groucho was on the doorstep. “Good evening, sir or madam,” he said. “We’re conducting a house-to-house survey in our neighborhood. The question is ‘Who would you rather have at the door—the wolf or Groucho Marx?’”

  “Can we get a look at the wolf?”

  “Sorry, time’s up, and you didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize. Better luck next time.” He came slouching in out of the night.

  Groucho set his coffee cup on the end table beside his armchair. “This stuff, Rollo, is a distinct improvement over the last batch I endured under your roof,” he said. “Your skill as a brewer is improving.”

  “Jane made the coffee this time,” I confessed.

  My wife asked him, “What do you think Dorothy is up to?”

  I’d just filled him in on my experiences in Santa Francesca. I tried to minimize my getting slugged, which was difficult with my head bandaged up.

  Legs creaking a bit, Groucho arose to commence pacing our living room. “It strikes me as quite possible, kiddies, that the lady was either helping the late Ty-Gor with his blackmailing,” he said, circling the sprawled Dorgan, “or she’s contemplating taking over the business. Hence the additional incriminating snapshots and the copy of the map. And the voice-throwing Arnie Carr may become her new partner in crime.”

  “Looks possible, yeah,” I agreed. “Though I still don’t think she killed Spellman.”

  Groucho halted in mid-rug. “The Southern belle,” he said, making a nearly successful attempt to snap his fingers.

  “The one O’Hearn told me about and the woman Salermo told you contacted Gallardo?”

  “That Southern belle, yes.” Groucho resumed pacing. “Little Dot might well be the lass in question, since a Gone with the Wind accent is easy to fake. Shall I demonstrate that point?”

  “No,” Jane told him. “We take your word for it.”

  “If she was in cahoots with Randy Spellman,” I pointed out, “then she lied to us about her reason for going to his trailer the night the guy was killed. He wasn’t blackmailing her.”

  “True,” Groucho agreed. “It’s still possible, though, that she was lured there by some sort of phony missive. I still believe somebody wanted to frame her for the murder.”

  “Somebody who knew she was working with him,” my wife said.

  “Maybe a blackmail victim,” I added.

  G
roucho’s slouch increased the more he paced. “Thus far none of the Spellman victims we know about were anywhere near him at the time he was shot.”

  “Far as we know,” I said.

  Jane asked, “What did you find out about that Arthur Wright Benson, Inc., accountant who took off, Groucho?”

  Returning to his chair, he recounted his interviews with Ira Silverlake and Doug Cahan’s singing sister. “He’s tied in with this some way,” he concluded. “I’m not sure how, but I’ve got an uneasy feeling. It may just be that I need a dose of castor oil, yet I fancy not.”

  “His sister could be lying,” suggested Jane, “and actually know where he’s hiding.”

  Groucho shook his head. “I don’t think so. Although there are recorded instances of my being fooled by women.”

  “Spellman might’ve known where this embezzler was hiding out,” I said. “So either Cahan or his fiancée, Alicia Benson, would have a damn good reason to do him in.”

  “Alicia and Doug weren’t lovebirds anymore, Rollo.” Groucho drank some of his coffee. “According to reliable sources, the romance had cooled considerably before Cahan dropped from sight. Therefore, it seems unlikely they’d team up on anything, even murder.”

  “The map,” Jane mentioned quietly.

  “The map indeed, Lady Jane,” said Groucho. “Spellman had a copy, and Dorothy and her ventriloquist chum had a copy. We have reason to believe it’s a map of part of Benson’s private jungle, and it’s safe to assume that it’s an important document and that something of value is buried there.”

  “You fellows ought to get out to Rancho Tygoro with a shovel and a compass,” suggested Jane.

  “That may be where Cahan buried his loot,” I said.

  “Or it may be,” said my wife, “where somebody buried Cahan.”

  Twenty-six

  Groucho and I stepped out of his Cadillac and into the growing night fog that was hanging over this stretch of the San Fernando Valley. We left the car parked at the edge of a wide stretch of what looked like pastureland. The road that quirked along the back side of Arthur Wright Benson’s private jungle was deserted.