Hollywood Lost

by Collins, Ace;

  The captain kicked a small rock and watched it roll down the hill. “Barry, do you ever dream?”

  “Sure Bill, doesn’t everybody?”

  “Are your dreams happy or sad?”

  “Mostly happy, I guess,” Jenkins answered. “I’ve never really thought much about it.”

  Barrister grimly frowned, “In my dreams, all I see are the faces of these dead women. Their lips keep moving like they are trying to tell me something, but I can’t hear what they are saying.” He nodded as he looked toward the sky, “Looks like we have enough light now to check things out.”

  The two solemnly walked back to where the crime scene crew was doing their job. Barrister leaned down to study the woman for a few seconds before inventorying the locale. Without looking back to the body he asked, “Who found her?”

  “I guess you’d call him a ranger or something,” Jenkins explained. “He’s an old guy who looks after this part of the park. He picks up trash, gives people directions, and is trained to apply first aid in case someone falls and gets hurt.”

  “I’m guessing,” Barrister groaned, “he didn’t see anyone drop her off.”

  “No.” Jenkins answered.

  The captain turned around and took a second look at the body. He studied her for a few moments and then noted, “This one is not dressed up for a party. Those are the kind of clothes you’d go shopping in or wear around the house.”

  “Yeah,” Jenkins added, “slacks and a cotton blouse. She has on flats too.”

  Barrister went down to one knee before saying, “She looks to be about five-feet tall. In fact, she could be the sister of the last victim. The size, the build, the hair color, the facial structure, it’s uncanny.”

  “There’s an unused, broken match beside her right hand,” Collins pointed out. “I got a photo of it.”

  “Thanks.” Barrister looked up at Jenkins, snapped his fingers, and whispered, “Blue. All these girls had on blue.”

  His partner quickly disagreed, “Not the bag of bones we found. She was wearing red.”

  The homicide head nodded, “But all the recent ones, starting with the bathing suit victim, have been outfitted in blue. The psychologist told me there had to be a trigger. He assured me if I kept looking, I would find it. It has to be blue. The color sets the murderer off somehow.”

  Barrister pushed off the ground and marched up the hill. Just as he topped the rise, he looked over his shoulder and yelled, “Let me know when you get her to Arnie. When she’s there I’m going to get that gossip columnist to come over and take a look at this one. I’m betting dollars to donuts that this gal worked in the movie business.”

  55

  July 7, 1936

  A phone call started his day way earlier than he’d wanted. And now it was five, the sun hadn’t even come up, and Jacob Yates was sitting in a downtown Beverly Hills diner working on a plate of scrambled eggs and toast. This was not the way to begin a Tuesday morning.

  Yates glanced up in the long mirror hanging behind the counter and noted Ellen Rains push open the door. She was dressed in light green from her shoes to her hat. She anxiously glanced to both sides of the diner before spotting the mogul. Like a hog on the way to a trough, she rushed to his booth and slid in.

  “We see each other way too much,” he mockingly cracked.

  “It’s not something I plan,” she assured him as she waved to a waiter. “Coffee, black, and a couple of donuts.”

  After taking a long sip of juice, Yates took a closer look at the woman who’d called him an hour before. Frowning he blurted out, “You look terrible!”

  “I haven’t been to bed,” she explained. She waited for the waiter to drop off her order before glancing back toward the man. “There’s been another one.”

  “If,” he grumbled, “you mean another strangling, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Actually,” she assured him, “you do. What does the name Rose Trebour mean to you?”

  So much color drained from his face he was whiter than a glass of milk. He gasped, “Someone murdered her?”

  She sadly nodded, “They brought me in the morgue to look at the body last night. As you’d asked me to do an interview with Miss Trebour the day she first stepped on the lot, I couldn’t lie on this one.”

  “It likely wouldn’t have taken the cops long to have made the identification anyway,” he noted.

  “Does she have any kind of association with Flynn?” Rains asked.

  “Yeah,” he grimly answered, “they worked on a scene together yesterday. She actually played the blonde the cops haven’t ID’d yet.”

  As the woman picked up a donut and took a bite, Yates pushed his plate away and sighed. His world was tumbling down around him, and there was apparently nothing he could do about it. As he glanced out onto the dark streets, he considered his options. For the first time in his life, none popped into his head.

  “You’d think he’d be smart enough to actually stop for a while,” he finally observed.

  “You mean Flynn?”

  “Ellen, who else could I be talking about? Our best bet might be just calling Barrister and turning Sparks over to the cops.”

  “Not yet,” Rains argued. “You still have a movie to finish. And that movie might very well save your studio.”

  He shook his head, “These murders will bring it tumbling down around me. When this story breaks, the papers will jump all over us for protecting a madman. I might as well shoot myself now.”

  “Do your people have any proof,” she asked, “that you know who the killer is?”

  “Are you talking real, concrete proof?” he asked.

  “Yes Jacob, the kind that could be presented in court and would convince a jury to vote to send Sparks to the gallows.”

  “No,” he admitted, “I met with the writers and our detectives yesterday, and everything we have on Flynn is circumstantial.”

  “And,” Rains pointed out, “you have more than the police do. So Barrister couldn’t arrest him either.”

  “That’s a real comfort,” he sarcastically added.

  “When you get any real evidence,” she suggested, “turn him over to the cops. Until then you need to have your people watch him day and night. Follow his every move.”

  “I don’t know,” Yates said, “what if the cops turn up something before we do?”

  “Odds are against that happening,” Rains assured him. “You’ve got much more money invested in this than they do. Your team can pay bribes and put pressure on people to lie or even forget. The cops can’t do that. Besides, if they do arrest Flynn, I have known what you were doing since day one. I can write stories that point out that you were so concerned about these girls you spent tens of thousands of dollars looking for the killer. I can make you and the studio look like you are pillars of justice.”

  “You might need to,” he cracked.

  She gulped down a mouthful of coffee and nodded, “But you have to promise that you’ll call me if and when you find out if Flynn did it. I need to know first so I can break the story nationally even before you turn Flynn Sparks over to Barrister. That way I can paint you as a hero father rather than a mogul trying to protect one of his biggest assets.”

  “I’ll make the call,” he replied. “Shame about Rose Trebour; that girl had star quality. She was going to make the studio a chunk of change. I actually went to New York and watched her in a play on Broadway. She wasn’t like the others this guy murdered; she could act.”

  “Make sure you send lots of flowers to her funeral,” Rains suggested. “Now, I have to get out of here.”

  Yates watched the woman take a last bite and then rush out into a city that was still sleeping. Sadly, even though he was living a nightmare, he was one of the few who were actually awake.

  56

  July 8, 1936

  Shelby was sitting at her sewing table cutting out a pattern for a dress that would be needed next week for the film The Pirate’s Lure when Betsy Minser str
olled through the door carrying a man’s suit coat. Across the room, Willard Mace looked up and shouted out a greeting. Minser ignored it.

  “Shelby, do you have a little time?” the supervisor asked.

  “In truth, this is the only thing I’m working on, so I have some time I can spare. Do you have a rush job?”

  “This isn’t even one we should be doing,” Minser complained. “Somehow Flynn Sparks lost a couple of buttons on his coat last night. As it is his personal property, we shouldn’t have to deal with it. He should hire someone or take it to the cleaners and have them do it, but, as he is the studio’s pet, we will take the job.”

  “I can do it,” Shelby assured her.

  “Willie,” Minser called out, “will you come over here?”

  The big man moved quickly to Shelby’s side and waited for instructions.

  “You see the two buttons left on this jacket?”

  “Yes, Miss Minser.”

  “There are some coats in storage that have the same buttons. Can you go grab one and bring it back to Shelby?”

  “Are they in the men’s vault at the far end of the hall?”

  Minser nodded, “I think they are.”

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he assured her.

  As Shelby stood and stretched, Minser apologized, “I wish I didn’t have to ask you to do this. I feel like I’m using you like Yates did last week.”

  “I work here,” Shelby said, “it goes with the territory. I’m just glad to have a job. A lot of people aren’t so lucky.”

  Minser crossed the room, picked up a dress from a table, checked the workmanship, and then hung it up. She let her fingers trace the light blue fabric before turning back. “I don’t like this place.”

  “But you’ve given your life to it,” Shelby argued. “You’ve been here since the day it opened.”

  “I know, but I just get tired of the way people are used. Even more, I’m just sick of how they sell themselves for a crack at fame. I mean, men like Flynn are jerks, but his type might be better than the women. So many of them do whatever it takes to land a part. It’s just that in Hollywood everything and everyone is for sale, and it makes me sick to my stomach.”

  Shelby nodded, “That’s true, I’ve seen it.”

  “Do you understand it?” Minser asked.

  Shelby sat back down on her stool, “I guess so. Times are tough; a lot of folks back home go to bed hungry at night. I can’t begin to tell you how many people I knew whose eyes looked dead. There was no life in them at all. They were good people, but I think they would have done anything . . . and I mean anything . . . to feed their hungry kids. When you want something really bad or you need something even worse, it’s hard to say no.”

  Minser closed the distance between them until she stood across the table from the young woman. “My parents came over from Ireland.” She sounded more like a woman confessing to a priest than a friend sharing a story. “I was born here a month after we arrived. My dad died in an accident a year later. Then, when I was three, my older brother and older sister died from influenza. After that, my mother and me lived in a tiny one-room apartment on the top floor of a five-story rooming house in New York City. Somehow, she always found a way to make enough to feed me and buy me nice clothes. She took me to the park and to church. We read books together and she taught me to sew. But several nights a week she left me at home alone. Our landlady watched out for me when my mother was gone. When I was eleven, I found out that Mom sold her body. Her street name was Blue. That’s how we survived.”

  Shelby shook her head, “I’m sorry.”

  “As a teenager I wanted to die,” Minser explained. “And when I got the chance I ran away. I ended up here. Ironic, now I help make the costumes for women who are involved in a more respectable form of selling themselves, and I work with men who use and abuse those women. My life has come full circle and I hate it.”

  “Not everyone is that way,” Shelby assured her. “There are people who still cling to values. And besides, your mother did what she had to do, and she did it because she loved you.”

  “Shelby,” Minser forcefully answered as tears rolled down her cheeks, “she took me to church and at the same time she was . . .”

  “I’ve got a coat,” Mace announced as he marched back into room. “I think the buttons match.”

  Shelby took the jacket and studied it for a moment, “These are perfect, Willie. I’ll get right to work on it.”

  Minser wiped away her tears and stepped over to her desk. Sitting down, she opened and looked at the calendar before announcing, “I need to go out in our little factory and make sure the girls are going to get those European peasant gowns done today. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  As her supervisor walked out, Shelby fell into her normal routine of dumping the coat’s pockets onto the table—a matchbook, some change, and some keys fell out. She grabbed a sack, dropped the items into it, folded the top over and stapled it shut. She then wrote on the date and the name Flynn Sparks and pitched the sack onto the designated shelf before starting her work. Five minutes later, she finished and hung the coat on the rack behind the table. She was about to once more work on the dress when Dalton Andrews strolled in.

  “I guess you didn’t expect to see me,” he said.

  “It might be a big lot,” she answered, “but I figured we’d run into each other at some point.”

  “I need to apologize,” he added. “I was a real heel the other night. I let my emotions overrule my judgment.”

  “I told you the truth,” she assured him. “The studio set up everything. I had no say in it. Just like you have no say in the movies you get.”

  “Can you forgive me?” he asked. “I’d like to try to make things right between us.”

  Shelby smiled, “Maybe a movie later in the week?”

  “Sounds good,” he agreed. “I’ll be in touch.” Andrews took another look at her before noting, “That blue dress looks wonderful on you. The color perfectly matches your eyes.”

  As they were concluding their plans, Flynn Sparks strolled in through the outside door. He looked from the actor to the woman, grinned, and asked, “Is my coat ready?”

  57

  July 9, 1936

  It was a crazy day at work. Shelby was called upon to repair four dresses ripped when a moving cart fell on soundstage 14, take four different sets of publicity photos promoting Galaxy’s church services, help create a clown costume for a new scene written into a child’s movie starring Mary Bright, and accepted a date with Dalton Andrews to attend a movie premiere on Friday night. Tired and hungry, all she wanted to do when she and her father got home was eat supper and listen to the radio. As it turned out, she didn’t even get to go inside the house before a short, wide man in a suit was demanding her attention.

  “Mr. Barrister,” Shelby announced as she stepped out of the family truck. “What brings you to our house?”

  “Can we talk?” the cop asked.

  “Who is this man?” John Beckett protectively inquired.

  “He’s a policeman,” Shelby explained. “You probably saw him at the studio church on Sunday.”

  “Is my daughter in some kind of trouble?” John asked.

  “Not at all,” Barrister assured the father. “There’s a matter we talked about at church that I need to discuss a bit more today. Let me assure you if all of our city’s residents were like your daughter, I’d be out looking for work.”

  “If it’s nothing serious,” John Beckett noted, “then I’ll leave you two out here. I need to go inside and get cleaned up. It was mighty dusty in the shop today.”

  The cop watched the older man walk away and step into the house before looking back to the woman, “Your father carries the weight of the world well. I’m sure he’s seen more than his share of troubles and yet he looks like a man at peace.”

  She mournfully shrugged, “He misses home. It breaks his heart he’s not farming. But he hides it well. Right now, he just feel
s he’s blessed because we have a place to stay, food to eat, and he has a job. A lot of our friends from back home don’t have nearly as much as we do.”

  “I understand,” Barrister assured her. “And compared to those whose loved ones have been murdered, I guess he is blessed. Miss Beckett, let’s move over to my car. We can talk while sitting in the front seat.”

  “We can talk here,” she suggested. “What’s this all about?”

  He folded his arms over his suit coat and posed a question, “Have you heard of a woman named Rose Trebour? She was an actress.”

  “I met her last week,” Shelby quickly answered. “I spent a couple of hours with Miss Trebour when I created an outfit for her for a movie that was shooting on our lot. I love her laugh. It is infectious. And she is one of the nicest people I’ve met in Los Angeles. She even sent me a thank-you note for my work.”

  “Miss Beckett,” Barrister continued, “do you happen to know if Flynn Sparks was in that film as well?”

  “Yes, but what’s this all about?”

  “We haven’t announced it to the newspapers yet,” Barrister explained, “but Miss Trebour suffered the same fate as Leslie Bryant. That is now seven women who have been strangled and dumped. And about the only connecting factor we have is Flynn Sparks. We can tie him to three of them.”

  She took a deep breath and looked toward the house. “Miss Trebour cracked jokes for the couple of hours we were together and even laughed when I accidentally poked her with a pin. She was filled with so much life and excitement, it is hard to think of her being dead.”

  “Miss Beckett,” the cop continued to probe, “I still don’t have the evidence to bring Sparks in. I can’t get a search warrant. I need some help before someone else dies.” Barrister paused, “Would he like to go out with you, or is the relationship with you nothing more than just publicity hype?”

  “The studio forced me to go out with him last weekend,” she explained. “I didn’t want to.”

  The cop shot her a stern look and pushed harder, “I didn’t ask you that.”